The promise of universal healthcare is one of the biggest unfulfilled promises in the world. 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 latest trends in dining as well as those of us unable to even put a frozen pie in the oven.
It’s as simple as pressing a button. The machine will beep, whirr, and cook the meal of your choice, with no need to do any tedious work like chopping vegetables, marinating them, or even 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 have recently 3D-printed a cheesecake. The process is as delicious as it sounds. 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 cracker with Nutella and banana puree. They also added 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 great deal of setup and fine tuning. To save money and time, the group wants to be able 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.”
This mix of successful prints and failures has revealed some essential rules in food printing. It is important to use harder ingredients to create structural elements, such as walls. These walls can then be filled with softer materials. You should taper these walls to make them thicker on the bottom but thinner at the top.
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 appealing
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. The technology of turning food into pastes is not appealing to people who are trying to consume more whole foods.
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.)
This was a conscious decision to keep the cheesecake ingredients close to what people are familiar with. “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 concerns about working with fresh foods, such as the need to store items at specific temperatures. 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.”
Cheesecake is not the only option.
3D-printed food is a growing area of interest, and it’s already popping up in areas you might not have thought of. A variety of companies use 3D printing to create plant-based meat substitutes that mimic the taste and texture of meat without harming 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.)
The 3D-printed steaks are being eaten in Europe now. However, the future will see an even wider variety of 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.
New types of food in the future
The work on 3D-printed food to date has mainly focused on recreating popular dishes using the 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.
The 3D printer will be a staple in every kitchen. It could be used for anything from creating healthy, customized meals at home to creating wild creations to serve in high-end 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. Perhaps the most important thing to ask is this: did the researchers actually eat the cheesecake that they printed and was it delicious?
“Yeah!” Blutinger said. “It tasted good.”
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