A home experimenter turns raw chicken translucent using Doritos dye
Making Chicken Transparent Using Dorito Dust
Inspired by a paper on making live tissue transparent with tartrazine — the yellow-orange dye on Doritos — the author soaked thin slices of raw chicken breast in homemade dye solutions. A roughly 0.19 M solution for 12 hours produced partial translucency, with grid lines visible through the meat and a gummy-bear look, though not the clarity of the original study. The post also walks through the optics: matching water's refractive index to that of proteins and lipids to cut scattering.
The chicken, even though the texture to the touch is the same, has a visual quality like that of gummy bears.
- waltbosz
I'm trying to imagine the origin story for this science, and I feel like the most fun one is that somebody wanted to make Doritos flavored chicken and accidentally discovered that the marinade turned the chicken breast transparent.
- masfuerte
Author notes the difficulty of cutting thin slices of raw chicken. If you lightly freeze it (or freeze it and let it nearly defrost) it's much easier.
- iandanforth
Translucent is a great word. Let's use it more!
- layer8
Fun fact: Doritos don’t contain tartrazine in Europe (including the UK). It’s not banned, but food products containing it must be labelled with “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children” in the EU.
- ricardobeat
How about a sous vide bath? Could go as long as 72 hours before it turns into complete mush.