So you can julienne vegetables with a hand tied behind your back? Cute, but that’s child’s play next to the knife skills of Gaku, an artist whose Instagram is dedicated to the art of mukimono. That’s the ancient Japanese culinary tradition of carving intricate patterns into food to create wildly elaborate garnishes. He’s gone next-level with the practice using little more than a hobby knife, a fresh piece of produce, and a very short time window — think about how long he has before an apple starts oxidizing.
Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to tell what he started with. (Answers: a radish, then a carrot.)
He’s also found a complex solution to the problem of ugly produce.
Beautiful as all of it is, he tells Japanese design blog Spoon & Tamago that he eats everything once he’s done so there’s no food waste. That task, though, apparently varies in its difficulty:
