Can you cook 3D-printed chicken with lasers?

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, it turns out you can 3D print chicken meat. Second, you can apparently cook with lasers (why have we not already been doing this for years?). And third, you can cook said 3D-printed chicken with said lasers.

This discovery was made by a research team from Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab. They first puréed a bunch of chicken meat, then 3D-printed it into a variety of different shapes. They then exposed the different pieces of chicken to different lasers — blue, mid-infrared and near-infrared.

The team found that the blue lasers cooked the inside of the chicken better, while the infrared was more suited to browning the outside. They also discovered that the lasers worked equally well through plastic, so food could be cooked that way within its packaging if necessary. In a taste test, both tasters preferred the laser-cooked 3D-printed chicken to chicken that had been prepared with conventional methods.