A 3D-printing lab has figured out how to automate the assembly and cooking of a seven-ingredient cheesecake 鈥� and the result doesn鈥檛 taste like a conventional dessert.
鈥淲hen you bite into it, you kind of feel the flavours hit you in different waves,鈥� says at Columbia University in New York. 鈥淎nd I think that鈥檚 a function of the layering inside of the actual structure.鈥�
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Blutinger and his colleagues grabbed seven ingredients from local grocery stores: graham crackers, peanut butter, strawberry jam, Nutella, banana puree, cherry syrup and frosting. They put anything not already in a paste form into a food processor.
That allowed a 3D printer to build up the cake by depositing the seven paste-like food ingredients in layers 鈥� a process resembling how people might squeeze out a tube of frosting.
But printing a dessert capable of holding its shape required much trial and error with five failed cakes. The researchers eventually increased the structural support by boosting the graham cracker portions from just 32 per cent of the dessert to more than 70 per cent.
The researchers also tested how a laser beam just a few millimetres wide could lightly brown the graham cracker portions of the cheesecake. 鈥淭heir work with lasers shows that, like traditional cooking, the precise application of heat plays a critical role in the development of texture and structure,鈥� says , CEO of Sugar Lab, a 3D-printing bakery in Los Angeles.
The team had to manually adjust the recipe each time before feeding updated instructions into the 3D printer鈥檚 computer software 鈥� and the printer itself followed each step without any way to sense the result. Blutinger anticipates future printers could receive feedback to adapt throughout assembly process.
Such experiments could eventually lead to home kitchen printers with a price tag like the Thermomix 鈥� a luxury all-in-one kitchen appliance costing about $1500. But printers would also need digital databases of 3D-printing recipes and a wide variety of food cartridges.
Still, some versions of 3D printers that use liquid to bind layers of dehydrated food ingredients have already become cost-competitive with traditional food manufacturing, says von Hasseln. His company Sugar Lab is working with 鈥渞ecognisable brands鈥� to put new 3D-printed foods on the market.
Whatever the potential for experimentation, 3D-printed foods may still have to follow basic culinary principles. 鈥淲e could theoretically take a pureed chicken and have it 3D printed in the shape of your head,鈥� says Blutinger. 鈥淏ut would you really want to eat that?鈥�
Npj Science of Food
