One of the greatest unfulfilled promises of the Star TrekThe food replicator is the future of style. The food replicator is a concept that appeals to both those who are always looking for the newest trends in dining as well as those who cannot be bothered with a frozen meal.
The machine will whirr and beep and produce the dish you choose, without the need for tedious preparations such as chopping, marinating, or pan-searing. It’s an idea far too good to be true — but we might be one step closer to this paradisiacal utopia than you think.
How to print a 3D cheesecake
Researchers at Columbia University 3D printed a delicious cheesecake. In an article published in npj Science of Food they detailed their findings. We spoke with the lead author Jonathan Blutinger about how they achieved it.
The hardware is still in research and not yet ready for consumer use, but has printed a cheesecake that was fully edible. Researchers layered graham crackers, Nutella and banana puree with strawberry jam, cherry glaze, and Nutella.
The principle of the machine is similar to a home-use 3D printer, but replaces spools of plastic filament with what the researchers call “food inks”. The researchers process the food to a smooth consistency, then load it into containers made of food-grade plastic. They extrude this mixture to create layers.
The current printing machine is very laborious and delicate. Each print requires a lot of time and effort to set up. To save time and money, the group is developing a method to simulate prints. But to get to this point required sitting through a lot of failed prints — which were apparently a chore for the researchers, even if they are rather delightful for an audience.
“It really hurt me inside when that was happening,” Blutinger said with a sigh. “That was hard to watch.”
These successful and unsuccessful prints have revealed a few basic rules for food printing. It is important to use firmer fillings to create structural elements, such as walls. These walls can then be filled with softer fillings.
The principles used in printing with food are very similar to those we use when building houses. It turns out that engineering axioms still apply, whether you’re constructing in brick or in banana.
Printing food to make it more palatable
As neat as this technology is, something researchers working in this area are keenly aware of is the ick factor which people can experience about what they’re eating. Many people today are attempting to eat a greater variety of whole foods, and consuming fewer additives. This could make the technologyization of food into pastes off-putting.
One way Blutinger’s group approaches this challenge is to keep the ingredients they use in their projects close to those that you’d find in any kitchen. The bananas that were used to make their cheesecakes came from a grocery store in New York City (the newspaper specifies Appletree Market) and they were mashed by hand.
(“We handmashed a banana with a fork until the consistency was uniform to ensure that the nozzle tip would not be obstructed during extrusion,” the article states, in a strong contender for my all-time favorite sentence published in an academic paper.)
It was done deliberately to use ingredients that were familiar. “It irks people enough to have food that they eat considered as ‘printed’,” Blutinger said. “So we had this mental shift that we had to work with ingredients that people were familiar with. It needed to be things from the grocery store, things we’re used to interacting with on a daily basis.”
The group works with a nutritionist and they stay away from what he described as “goops and powders” to try and make people comfortable with the idea of this new way of preparing dishes. “We’re using all the same stuff you usually cook with, it’s just the way it’s being assembled is different,” he said.
There are still some practical issues when working with fresh ingredients like the need to store specific items at a certain temperature. The current system involves loading food into food-grade tubes, then storing those tubes in the refrigerator as needed. After each use of the machine, the machine must be thoroughly cleaned. That sort of thing could be automated in the future to ensure food safety, meaning that printed food would be just as safe and healthy — or even more so — than food prepared by hand.
It’s still a mental shift to think about food preparation in this way, but it needn’t be a negative one in terms of palatability. “If anything I think in a weird way it brings you closer to the food,” Blutinger said. “Because you can see all the ingredients that go into it, and you can see it being made in front of you.”
Beyond cheesecake
3D-printed food is a growing area of interest, and it’s already popping up in areas you might not have thought of. In the area of plant-based alternatives to meat, 3D printing has already been used by a number of companies to produce food that has the texture and taste of meat but does not harm animals.
“If you think about 3D printing as controlling a bead of food on a millimeter scale, each one of those beads could be muscle fiber or fat fiber in a printed steak,” Blutinger explained. “So you can create your own unique marbling patterns.” (He also does research into this area for the Israeli company Redefine Meat.)
Currently, 3D printed plant-based meats are produced and consumed primarily in Europe. But the future will bring with it a broader range food printing possibilities. One thing that 3D printing can do that human cooks generally can’t — bar a few highly skilled professional chefs — is to prepare ingredients in extremely thin layers, changing the way the flavors meld or complement each other.
“Take a typical dinner: Last night I had salmon, mushrooms, asparagus, and rice,” Blutinger said. “If I could layer that in a new way and interlace those ingredients to create a flavor I haven’t had before — that’s a pretty cool thought.”
For more complex food creations, we’ll need a way not only to assemble food but also to cook it. Blutinger’s group is also working on this with a new method called laser cooking, which uses lasers that can penetrate into food to cook it either on the inside or the outside as required. It’s possible that a future appliance could combine 3D printing and laser cooking for a one-box solution for preparing all kinds of meals and snacks.
Future food types
The majority of work done on 3D printed food has been focused on recreating familiar dishes with this new technology. It’s particularly useful for customizing individual orders, like a machine that could easily make a batch of burgers for a family, one of which has no onions and another of which has extra ketchup. But its supporters claim that it has much more potential than just that.
A 3D printer is envisioned as a standard appliance in every kitchen. It can be used to create everything from healthy, personalized meals for home to wild creations for restaurants.
This means that the food we can make using a printer is likely to be entirely new. “Most of the foods we’re used to eating have been optimized for our cooking appliances and utensils,” Blutinger said. Take the beloved pizza, which is perfectly suited to being assembled by hand and baked in a hot oven — a 3D-printed version is unlikely to improve on this long-refined classic.
But 3D printed food could be something completely different. Because of the way it can lay down thin layers, it can create entirely new eating sensations — like the cheesecake, which apparently was interesting to eat because each of its seven ingredients could be tasted in a wave. “It changes the way you have to think about food being assembled,” Blutinger said.
For now, though, we’re just starting to explore this new world of food possibilities, and that begins with these unconventionally flavored printed desserts. The most important question, then, is: Did they eat the desserts that were printed?
“Yeah!” Blutinger said. “It tasted good.”
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