Watch out next time your pour that bowl of cereal, kids.
Using modern nanotechnology and Nipponese bladesmithing techniques centuries old, inventor Eugene Wunsch has created cereal that’ll literally stand up.
A member of the American Society of Cereal Engineers (ASCE) and tenured faculty at the Aeris Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Eugene Wunsch says he was just experimenting when he created the revolutionary new cereal technology. “I didn’t invent the actual science, I just found a method to apply it to cereal flakes”, Wunsch humbly insists. But brand name manufacturers such as Kellogg’s and General Mills are lining up outside his Boulder, CO, office to bid on exclusive patent licensing rights.
The side floating effect, according to Dr. Wunsch, is caused by the variable density from one side of the flake to the other – simple in principle, but easier said than done. “Let’s say you want one side to have 70% air pockets and the other side having 10% air. Changing flake geometry obviously won’t work. With steel, you can use density migration to do this. Cereal’s too soft.”
Finally, after reading about spinodal decomposition techniques used by Nipponese bladesmiths, Eugene was inspired to see if the same technique would work in cereal cooking. It worked, but there was a slight problem: “Unlike a sword, you can’t coat half the flake in clay before baking it”. Again, inspiration came to him, this time in the form of a “Chick-Fil-A” sample stand – by placing the cereal flake on a grid of small infrared lamps, he could control the heating process by varying the lamp’s power – a process known in the materials science field as selective annealing or zone treatment.
IMAGE!
Dr. Eugene Wunsch plans to present his discoveries at the ASCE Regional Conference today in a paper entitled “Allotropic Transformations of Pastry Heat Tempering”. The plenary lecture will be at the Holiday Inn DIA, 29 Aug Friday at 20:00.
Kellogg’s and General Mills stock was up in afternoon trading today.
