Molecular gastronomy would be a fun thing to try at one of the hacker spaces (hacker dojo, noisebridge, ...) (or just one well-equipped kitchen).

Several cooking techniques (e.g. sous vide) use some interesting electronics and control systems, combined with chemistry. I've also seen some traditional techniques/foods (smoker for pulled pork) augmented with monitoring systems (it posts to twitter when ready).

Switching food distribution from "ship finished packaged processed product to end user for consumption" to "query local ingredients, do local processing in a semi-automated fashion, profit" would be interesting. If you could make the tools smarter, and give step by step instructions and instant feedback/correction if something goes wrong, cooking would be a lot easier, and more fun. (e.g. making a sauce, a camera could observe if it is too thin, and suggest a specific amount of cornstarch to add)

Sort of like the "rock band" of cooking.

As a person whose had this stuff all his life (delicious!) I should mention that salep has a dual purpose: it also adds flavor to the ice cream. There is also a hot drink that contains salep that has the same characteristic flavor, often accompanied by cinnamon.

Oh, wow. I was just gonna run out and get some more KelcoGel Gellan Gum this morning. Thanks for the recipe.

Actually, molecular gastronomy is pretty amazing stuff. Where can an ordinary person buy this stuff in public? A restaurant supply store?

Willpowder.net is a good place to start, shoot me an email for more info on the topic in general including where to buy obscure shit, I cook a lot with these ingredients

Holy crap, that's a cool site. Thanks for the pointer.

Its overpriced on some items unfortunately, but its trickier to track some other shit down so the convinience is worth it

This is an amazing blog in general, I highly reccomend it