Smart Phones. Smart Homes. Now Smart Cooking?!?

Cooking devices that incorporate 3D printers, lasers, or other software-driven processes may soon replace conventional cooking appliances. Watch this video to see how Columbia engineers are working to implement such technology and hear them explain the pros and cons of 3D-printed food technology, how 3D-printed food compares to traditional food, and the future landscape of our kitchens.

Transcript

00:00:00 food printing today is a novel technique  typically it involves one or two ingredients   and rarely involves cooking in practice however  most food prep involves many ingredients and   cooking during the process here we try and push  the limits of food printing to incorporate many   ingredients and inline cooking we did this  by constructing a seven ingredient Slice   of Cheesecake our design went through multiple  iterations before achieving a successful final   print all designs used the same seven ingredients  design one was a simple stacked layered structure structure crumbled when ingredients like jelly and  banana puree cannot hold their shape under stress in our next design we leveraged more  structural ingredients like peanut   butter and Nutella to form pools for  the jelly and banana puree to rest in the walls however were too thin and toppled  easily from slight perturbations of the nozzle

00:01:27 to fix this we taper The Walls by making them  thicker at the base and thinner at the top this proved more effective until  the last layer of graham cracker   was deposited and crumbled the softer  ingredients underneath it thank you since graham cracker was the stiffest ingredient   we decided to use it more throughout  the construction for greater rigidity this worked a lot better but there was  still significant smearing of ingredients   throughout the internal structure which  meant that we had to size up our model   and provide more clearance for the food nozzle  the deposit walls around the pooled ingredients foreign issue was this coiling effect especially  visible with the graham cracker paste

00:02:49 to fix this we adjusted the offset  height between successive layers   and reduce the speed of the  initial material deposition for our final design iteration we reduce  the ceiling thickness of the last graham   cracker layer we made the initial Z height  for the Nutella lower to compensate for   material sagging and we laser broiled  the last graham cracker layer foreign who knows perhaps food printing might   allow people to share a slice of  pie even when they are far apart