After having great time with Techno Food event, me and Nina decided to make organize a second event in Florovo Gastronomsko Podstrešje series. Since we were in Finland at the time, we got Koelse involved and set the theme as do-it-yourself kitchen technology. Koelse modular synthesizer system is amazing, so we decided to hook it up with the kitchen, too.

First thing was to building the kitchen, which was a really fun experience. We rummaged through Koelse studio for everything that could somehow be useful in preparing food. Anything that produced, retained or reflected heat was accepted, together with some things that could work as cutting tools, or were simply nice for presenting the food. We also got lucky because my employer was renovating the office at the time. We retrieved a lot of discarded office kitchen equipment from there. The raw material collected this way was turned into various ovens, grills, soup heaters and such.

Koelse musical equipment has wonderful interfacing, with lots and lots of possibilities for both input and output. Naturally we leveraged this, adding similar interfaces to our cooking stuff where possible. This way get managed to get the kitchen to cook to the tune of music, and to get the music to play to the tune of cooking.

Regarding the menu, we decided ask our guests to bring some ingredients. Everything was pooled together, creating a big pile of source material for all kinds of funny dishes. I do not think anybody recorded the exact menu. At least we had bread and fruit appetizers served from a rotating record player, apples cooked under spotlights, soup from the coffee machine and casserole from the icebox oven. For grande finale, we cooked apples directly with mains electricity — very spectacular, very dangerous, a lot of fun, but not too tasty.

Appropriately for a diy crazy kitchen, at one point the whole house was filled with smoke. Investigation on the cause revealed that our icebox oven was actually really powerful, but the plastic cable we had used to insulate it melts easily.

For drinks, we decided to try out a little experiment we had read about: powderized alcohol. In the internet sources, special tapioca maltodextrin is used. However, it turned out to be very expensive. So, keeping with the diy spirit, we instead go some regular tapioca flour from an import export store. Getting the flour and rum to mix was surprisingly difficult and very messy. However, the effort was not wasted, because the end result was surprisingly edible and amazingly intoxicating.

I was particularly satisfied with the night because our guests took active role in the event. Maria from Ruokaa - Food - Mat blog came prepared with her own weird cooking untensils and was amazingly creative inventor of dishes. Her powderized alcohol balls with chocolate icing were unforgettable. And Janne came with his new painting Howl, turning the event into his private view, too.