Lightsabers can make surprisingly good cooking tools.
Elegant weapons for a more civilized age they may be, that’s not to say that lightsabers can’t have noncombat uses. A lightsaber could easily have dozens of practical uses outside of combat, but the one I’ll be focusing on today is cooking.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: lightsabers for cooking? Aren’t Lightsabers weapons? Yes, but weapons can also be cooking tools, and cooking tools can also be used as weapons. A cleaver is basically just a short machete, and a wok can easily be used as a makeshift club. There are even certain foods that lightsabers would be uniquely suited to preparing due to its properties, like high temperature and controllable length.
To that end, here’s my top 5 foods I’d use a lightsaber on.
1. Bread
Long story short: lightsabers would make the best bread-slicers/toast-makers ever.
Toast is bread that has been browned as a result of exposing its surface to high heat. This makes the bread firmer to allow toppings to be more easily spread on it, as well as giving it that delicious toasty flavor courtesy of the Maillard reaction.
A lightsaber would toast the bread while slicing it, due to all that lovely heat doing the cooking. No need for you to get a bulky toaster to do the job! Just grab your lightsaber and slice away! Although, you want to take care to not adjust your lightsaber’s power levels too high, or you might end up having to scrape charcoal off of your toast before eating it.
Unless you happen to like the taste of burnt toast, like I do. In that case, by all means, go ahead and enjoy.
2. Liquids
Lightsabers would be great water purifiers.
While lightsabers don’t work underwater without special modifications, you don’t need to submerge the whole lightsaber to boil something. All you need to do is submerge the blade in the liquid for however long it takes to boil it, and presto! Whether it’s soup, coffee, or just plain water; if it’s a food that can boil, the lightsaber will do it.
Because of this, a lightsaber is basically a portable and reusable water purifier. Just stick a lightsaber in a container of suspect water, wait for it to come to a roiling boil, and now you have drinkable water. It may or may not taste good, but at least it’s better than dying of dehydration.
3. Kebabs
Ah yes, the sight of a lightsaber skewer with chunks of glistening meat cooking on it brings a tear to your eyes and drool to your mouth, doesn’t it?
While lightsabers cut through organic materials like meat with ease, the cutting action isn’t effortless. Dead bodies do appear to resist being cut. We’ve seen lightsabers being used to impale targets, and they have to be pulled out again rather letting the dead body’s own weight free the lightsaber.
This means that a lightsaber could be used to impale small chunks of meat. This would cook the meat chunks from the inside-out, allowing the meat to be tender on the outside and crispy on the inside. As with the toast though, care would have to be taken not to turn the power level up too high. The last thing you’d want is to overcook your kebab.
4. Onions
Caramelized onions are a delicious food item.
Caramelized onions have a deliciously sweet and nutty flavor that comes from their sugars being browned by the heat. Unfortunately, they also take 30-45 minutes of stir-frying in a pan before they’re properly browned. That’s a lot of time and effort spent on making something so wonderfully yummy, so why wait that long when you have a lightsaber?
By carefully slicing the onion into thin slices with a lightsaber, you can brown the onions even as you’re slicing them. Of course, you have to concentrate on cutting the onion very thinly, or else you’ll be left with a layer of undercooked or even raw onion in the slices.
5. Crème brûlée
This is quite possibly the most niche use of the lightsaber yet. However, the world of desserts could use a lightsaber in this one dish: crème brûlée.
Crème brûlée is a dessert food that consists of custard topped with a layer of crispy caramel. The contrast in texture and taste between the custard and the caramel is what makes it so popular. The caramel layer may be prepared beforehand and added to the dish, but that’s the boring way. The manly way is to sprinkle sugar on top of the custard, and then brown it with a kitchen flamethrower.
A lightsaber could be used to brown the sugar to make caramel, but that could be done with any kitchen flamethrower. No, what a lightsaber could do is make crème brûlée that’s divided into segments by pieces of caramel. To do this, simply cut the custard into triangular segments, sprinkle sugar on each side of the triangles, place them in the serving bowl, and then insert and move the lightsaber along the gaps in the segments. This will produce a caramel layer along the lightsaber’s path as it melts and browns the sugar. You could then make that caramel layer on top, and now your lightsaber crème brûlée is complete. Now you’ll have crispy caramel on top of and inside your crème brûlée.
Conclusion
Kylo Ren should just give up on evil and start his own lightsaber cooking show. He’ll attract an audience of billions and get stinking rich. Plus, he gets to eat all the Ewoks he’ll ever want. What more could he need?
