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.

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.

Translucent is a great word. Let's use it more!

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.

How about a sous vide bath? Could go as long as 72 hours before it turns into complete mush.

As the author seems to be around: have you considered surface roughness of the sample as problem to transparency?

Add some water between the grid pattern and the chicken and also some on top of it - or even conduct the experiment under water and the results should be better. You might also freeze the meat before cutting to achieve much smoother surfaces in the first place?

This is a lighthearted topic and a well-written article.

But what it reveals about our relationship with food is a little unsettling. The intensely chemical nature of Doritos and the whole notion of turning flesh into something alien - it’s all very far removed from food as a source of nourishment and of natural origin.

I once found a Cheeto-shaped thing in a Cheetos bag that was nothing but Cheeto-coating. It was wonderful. Can't imagine what it did to my insides.

Can I eat it? And is it tasty?

I did not see answers to these important questions when reading the article.

59 comments and nobody has even mentioned "Fringe"?

I mean, I know this is more of a serious forum, but any thread that has "transparent chicken" and "dorito dust" in the title has be a one of them lighter ones...

a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2H31RzTPoU

This headline could literally be a NileRed video.

What does it do to people? Do I get a transparent anus if I eat a family size bag of Doritos?

I wonder what the altered chicken would look like after being cooked vs normal chicken.

Too much Math for not much of a result.

This is why we must fund the sciences. How else would we get transparent Dorito tendies?

I had this dream once where we invented a type of tattoo that would make your skin transparent so you could see muscle and veins underneath. I think it could still happen.

See also:

I made transparent chicken - MrGreenGuy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2H31RzTPoU

They used to say Yellow 5 was really bad for males... and it used to specifically say "Yellow 5" in the ingredients. First time I heard it called "Tartrazine!"

so making a sucrose solution should also have the same effect?

Making very tiny thin slices of chicken very slightly transparent using *the dye most commonly found in dorito dust

I mean this is fun, but let’s be honest, they didn’t exactly crush up a bunch of Doritos, shake chicken breast in the dust, and create some sort of clear chicken meat

enjoyed the article. this was both fascinating from a technical perspective, and repulsive from a food perspective

seeing the essentially un-cleanable calipers touching raw chicken irks me to hell, even if it is a cheapy pair.

As the zoomers say these days "Unstoppable scroll vs unskippable title"