Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Photo Pizza

Order online, upload the .jpg, wait 30
  (+23, -3)(+23, -3)(+23, -3)
(+23, -3)
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You've seen the birthday cakes with the photos printed on them, yet no one asks for them on Pizza. Order your picture pizza party in a fraction the time it takes for you to order a custom cake, upload the photos and you are done. Your canvas is larger too. This allows you to print out the persons full name, put up a meaningful message and still have room for personal messages of get well or congratulations.
sartep, Jul 03 2005

What Is That? http://www.ltscotla...resources/pizza.gif
A picture of a picture pizza--or is it? I found the link on Po's Pizza Mind Game. [baconbrain, Jul 03 2005]

The resolution would not be sacrificed http://www.tailorma.../twins_birthday.jpg
This uses all soy inks. Imagine it on a pizza. [sartep, Jul 03 2005]

Laser Etching on Wood http://www.granitea...woodworking/Wood-7/
Make the top layer of melted white cheese, stick the pizza in the Laser Etcher, and little Jimmy *is* a pizza face. [baconbrain, Jul 06 2005]


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Annotation:







       Who boned this? The only problem would be getting a vegetarian (so everyone could eat it) tasty ingredient which could be used for writing. Not sure about the JPG file though, why not just order over the phone and charge 10p a letter or whatever? [+]
Germanicus, Jul 03 2005
  

       Your canvas may be bigger, but your pixel size is much, much larger. You need to address that problem.
This is an example of the kind of idea that chaps me severely. The thought, the concept, the wish is there, and is instantly dropped onto the Halfbakery like so much raw pizza dough. "Garsh, wuddent it be nice if'n we could put pichurs on pizza."
There is no effort here, no artistry, no accomplishment, no originality. No one will look at the idea and gasp with wonder, no one will admire the elegance of the solution, no one will applaud the originator.
Instead, retentives like me start snarling about pixel size. What are you planning to write with? It had better not be the pepperoni--I want complete coverage. Have you even experimented with this at home, by hand?
Quite often the reason something isn't being done is that it physically cannot be done. Try it or think about it, then post it.
baconbrain, Jul 03 2005
  

       I look askance at pizzas with blue toppings, too, [baconbrain].
jurist, Jul 03 2005
  

       With the right palette of colours - tiny, tiny pieces of red pepper, green pepper, mushroom, etc. I think this should be possible.
hippo, Jul 03 2005
  

       Agreed, a nice, even layer of white cheese, then a mosaic of condiments--that would be great. I just want the guy that posts stuff like this to put some thought into it, not just make a wish.   

       Now we'll be working out mosaic makers, and I already have an idea about that--but I'm not going to put it up here until I think about it.
baconbrain, Jul 03 2005
  

       I love this idea! It could easily be made to work if you're prepared to sacrifice a bit of resolution. You'd still get an impression of the photo even with fairly large chunks, and it would work well from a distance. There's no need to be photorealistic - it could be like an Arcimboldo painting or more impressionistic. Red and yellow are sorted already of course, green could be various types of vegetable, blue could be Boletus, orange carrot or peppers, violet aubergine - all of it is practical. If it isn't feasible to "print" it, it could still be planned on graph paper and put together by hand.
Marvellous!
nineteenthly, Jul 03 2005
  

       Boletus? Blue mushrooms? Really?   

       //I just want the guy that posts stuff like this to put some thought into it,// [sartep]'s intellectual credentials have been validated many times in the past. His ability to assemble a mouthwatering pizza using blue elements is still somewhat in question.
jurist, Jul 03 2005
  

       well, stuff my crust, bb's criticism leads me to bun this (well, I would have done anyway)
po, Jul 03 2005
  

       Come on! A quick rampage around the 'net finds only one instance of anyone trying anything resembling art on a pizza, and that was children using 3/4 inch stars. The pixel size is the issue, and the original idea totally ignored that.
Yeah, I'd like pictures on my pizza too. Can I get my favorite porn people?
  

       --   

       Okay, I give up. Sorry. I'm obviously not rational about this. I'm very hungry, and I'm thousands of miles from the nearest good pizza. And hundreds of miles from even a bad pizza. Picture that, and have some pity.
baconbrain, Jul 03 2005
  

       [baconbrain], are you just a pizza conoisseur or in Antarctica? Sorry, i do have sympathy and i don't know what pizzas are like "near" you.
Yes, Boletus mushrooms bruise blue, but i think they might change colour on heating. Alternatively, red cabbage goes blue with alkali, and there are edible lichens, so maybe they could be used, but the taste issue could go out of the window there.
Cephalopod ink is sort of bluish and is consumed by humans, but that would arguably make it non-vegetarian unless there were dairy octopus.
Hmm...
nineteenthly, Jul 03 2005
  

       bb, well, I had a stab at making pictures on a pizza in this very place so you didn't look very far. I think hunger has swayed your judgement.
po, Jul 03 2005
  

       Hunger, yeah. I'm in a small town on the island of Sumatra, that's Indonesia. The cook at this camp is Swedish Army--his specialty is pasta with corn in the sauce. Which is not pizza, by a long way.   

       Po, what are you on about? //stab at making pictures on a pizza in this very place// You mean on the HB somewhere?
baconbrain, Jul 03 2005
  

       I was thinking of the mindgame one but I didn't link it because it is so very different.
po, Jul 03 2005
  

       [baconbrain], if you can make bread dough and get hold of tomato puree and cheese, which maybe you can't of course, it would seem possible to make at least a margarita. Swedish though? What about surstromming on pizza? I suppose the tin would probably explode on its way to Sumatra.
nineteenthly, Jul 03 2005
  

       Rather self-referential, but once, (not that long ago), I posted an idea for a "Resume Pizza". Either the box, or the pizza, I believe, would be imprinted with your resume, and then delivered to a place you had recently interviewed.   

       The goal was to have it sent, right when starving bosses went to lunch.   

       Or was that "Exploding Resumes"?
blissmiss, Jul 03 2005
  

       It was the box and it was an excellent idea.
bristolz, Jul 03 2005
  

       No, although they had this thing where names entered on their website would be projected behind the band on stage and when I was watching The Who on television I saw [po]'s name scroll across behind Mr Daltrey.
hippo, Jul 03 2005
  

       Doing this with the Turin Shroud would knock the bottom out of the Sign From God market.
nineteenthly, Jul 03 2005
  

       absinthe saw it too. is that my .5 seconds of fame?
po, Jul 03 2005
  

       Yes Bliss, bring back your Pizzame. I loved the idea.
sartep, Jul 03 2005
  

       I think it might be possible to combine this with something similar to ASCII art, using the toppings as characters.
Ling, Jul 04 2005
  

       I think ASCII art would be more effective using those children's pasta shapes in the forms of letters.
hippo, Jul 04 2005
  

       + If you need to write something, you could use tomato sauce like piped icing on a cake.
CloakedBeauty, Jul 04 2005
  

       Rather than topping the pizza with relatively large chunks of olive, pineapple, mushroom and so forth, if you were really attached to the idea of a high-resolution picture on it, maybe there could be nozzles squirting variously-proportioned quantities of differently-coloured ingredients which were either fluid (e.g. cheese, tomato puree) or could be powdered and suspended in a clear viscous fluid. Therefore, this would basically be an inkjet printer using food, which is quite similar to an icing printer for a cake.
nineteenthly, Jul 04 2005
  

       //powdered and suspended in a clear viscous fluid.//
Remind me to keep you well away from my olives and asparagus.
angel, Jul 04 2005
  

       Chinese eggplant (aubergine) provides a delightful blue color when steamed ...
reensure, Jul 04 2005
  

       [reensure], i'll have to try that, thanks. I personally am very enthusiastic about blue food and i don't understand why everyone else seems to find it repulsive. [angel], i know what you mean, but i think squid ink is probably largely melanin suspended in mucus, and people do actually consume that, even if not directly.
nineteenthly, Jul 04 2005
  

       That would certainly be a neat solution, and in fact maybe the problem here would then become merely one of making the right kind of cheese, and it wouldn't affect the flavour, but that in itself might be boring. Actual flavoured ingredients might clash, but they would make it more interesting. However, sheets of cheese make this very close to being baked, so to speak.
nineteenthly, Jul 04 2005
  

       The way it is done with frosting is that the printer prints soy ink images on a thin starch layer that is later placed upon the frosting. I agree and feel it can be done with cheese.
sartep, Jul 05 2005
  

       For an ironic twist, order your pizza with a photo of a pizza on it.
Ling, Jul 05 2005
  

       [Ling], worse, imagine a less-than-scrupulous pizza parlor doing that, portraying fancy pizza that they never actually make!   

       As an addendum to the overall idea, the linked notion about using colored cheeses, topped with a mosaic of small topping-pieces, implies that two different pictures are possible. Of course, you'd have to scrape off the toppings to see the picture at the cheese layer...
Vernon, Jul 05 2005
  

       Ceci n'est pas une pizza.
nineteenthly, Jul 05 2005
  

       Could you take a cooked pizza and apply the printed 'icing sheets' from the current cake printer technology? It seems the sheets are thin so they will not effect the taste. The surface of pizza is not as smooth as cake; On the otherhand a Rembrant with icing bags filled with various ground toppings could make the texture work for him.
GeorgeF, Jul 05 2005
  

       I can't imagine the icing could possibly be thin enough not to ruin the taste. I suppose you'd have to try it. Maybe it'd depend on your tolerance of sweetness.
nineteenthly, Jul 05 2005
  

       Sweet pizza...gross...
CloakedBeauty, Jul 05 2005
  

       Dessert pizza is common -- CC's, for example.   

       It was mentioned on Jeopardy last night that Lactobacillus Acidophilus ferments milk without changing the flavor. Perhaps with suitable genetic modification to build heat tolerance and to imbue the Acidophilus with secretory ability over a range of colors, these probiotic cultures could be distributed by ink jet and would in a matter of moments secrete a colored image.
reensure, Jul 05 2005
  

       I'm sure this would be a hit with the kids. Just a plain cheese pizza with pictures of worms.
Worldgineer, Jul 05 2005
  

       Sweet things are put on pizzas already though. Even so, such pizzas do not appeal to me.
nineteenthly, Jul 05 2005
  

       Hawaiian pizza is sweet and good.   

       It uses barbeque sauce, and has chicken and pineapples on it. Yeah, gross, but ... not. Its quite disorienting.
daseva, Jul 05 2005
  

       SDG, o/t all your ideas reinstated since the accident? how really wonderful!
po, Jul 05 2005
  

       (yipes, but tinyurl your patent link - it drives your ideas off my screen)([dase], go to tinyurl.com, or one of the other URL shortening websites)([Steve] thanks)
Worldgineer, Jul 05 2005
  

       how do you do that?
daseva, Jul 05 2005
  

       It may be possible to put pre-printed text inside a slice of Mozarella cheese. I'm suggesting making string cheese the way that taffy with images in it is made, with some strands colored. Some pizzas are made with the cheese barely melted, and on them the text should survive. Of course, if the pizza is all bubbly and good, the text would be lost.
baconbrain, Jul 06 2005
  

       Because cheese darkens nicely (and tastes quite good) when charred, it should be possible to print monochrome images onto a mozzerella substrate using some sort of dot-matrix thermal printing technology - perhaps cannibalised from one of those old fax machines or thermal printers that used that funny silver-backed paper.
hippo, Jul 06 2005
  

       Yeah! I was just thinking of the screens we used to drop on photographs to break them into dots for photocopying. It might be a bugger making a custom screen, and it wouldn't work well without a point-source of heat, and it might b . . .   

       Oh, what the heck--just melt a nice layer of white cheese on top, then laser-etch the whole d--n pizza. The technology is already on hand, and is being used to make pictures on wood. Monochromatic, probably sepia-tones, but sharp and pretty. And crunchy and tasty.   

       [Later] I just Googled up a link to some laser-etched wood. The machine might cost $30K, but this will work. It takes about 30 minutes just for the etching, but it may be able to shorten that. You can be a pizza face.   

       [Even later] When I Googled for 'laser pizza' all I found was pizza places with laser tag--except the the third listing, which was for the Halfbakery's laser-cut pizza idea.
baconbrain, Jul 06 2005
  

       Heh. Millefiori String Cheese Sticks. That idea is good enough to post on its own, [baconbrain].
jurist, Jul 06 2005
  

       Millefiori? . . . <Google: Millefiori> . . . Oh, Jeez!
baconbrain, Jul 06 2005
  

       A friend of mine used to rightly deride the quality of Domino's Pizza by saying "it's not worth the paper it's printed on." I guess he'd love this.
harrisj, Jul 06 2005
  

       Just dice the standard toppings a bit finer, and create a "printer" with different "nozzles" for, for instance, .25" pepperoni (magenta), .25" black olive (black), .25" red onion (cyan), and .25" cheese (yellow and white). Each piece is placed where needed: full color. Low resolution, sure, but who's really looking to their pizza for high quality photo output? (could employ finer dicing, at greater expense)   

       [edit: OK, slightly redundant comment, but perhaps enough new there to help. redundant comment, but perhaps enough new there to]
oxen crossing, Jul 06 2005
  

       We're calling this idea [Photo Pizza], but what we're really discussing is photographic reproduction.   

       Let's take it to the next level. I want a PizzaCam...I focus and compose the image using the optics, then the scene is recorded on the blank pizza medium.   

       I imagine the prototype will be rather bulky, and the Polaroid would be lightspeed compared to the development cycle of these images.   

       Move over, Ansel Adams.
normzone, Jul 06 2005
  

       Perhaps a networked printing pizza oven?  Runs the Pizzascript pizza description language. Could also have a memory card reader for direct-to-pizza photo printing using RIP software (Richly Italian Pizza).
bristolz, Jul 06 2005
  

       Isn't Pizzascript for vector graphics?
nineteenthly, Jul 06 2005
  

       [bristolz], that would bring new meaning to the phrase "rip and burn".
normzone, Jul 06 2005
  

       How about a pizza with binary information burnt into it that's machine-readable, so you could stick it into a special optical drive that could both write to and read from it like a CD?
nineteenthly, Jul 06 2005
  

       Perhaps the first thing that [baconbrain] needs upon arrival back home is a very good pizza but cruelly disguised with a detailed image of pasta and corn toppings printed upon it. I am not at all sure why he needs this, though.
bristolz, Jul 06 2005
  


 

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