(CNN) Researchers have been pushing the boundaries of 3D printing for decades, using the manufacturing technique to create consumer goods like furniture and shoes, human organs and even a rocket. But can industrial technology be applied to create a fully baked dessert that can be made in your home kitchen?
Engineers at Columbia University set out to do just that. According to a study published Tuesday in the journal NPJ Science of Food, a team whipped up a seven-ingredient vegan cheesecake that was assembled and baked entirely by a 3D printing machine and – in a new innovation – laser technology.
The experiment is a step towards developing practical applications for 3D printing in mechanically assembled foods, the researchers said. The machines needed to create and bake a 3D-printed dessert already exist — at least at Columbia Engineering’s New York lab — but There is not yet a plethora of cookbooks explaining how the technology can be applied.
“If this (technology) came out, it would be like having an iPod without MP3 files,” said study co-author Dr. Jonathan Blutinger, mechanical engineer and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia Engineering Creative Machines Lab. “So there has to be a place where you can download recipes, create your own recipes, and get inspiration on what you can actually do with this machine to make it really big.”
Blutinger acknowledged that the concept of 3D printing food can be daunting to people.
“Maybe there’s a stigma attached to that word (3D printing),” he told CNN. “Normally, when you think of printing, you think of an industrial process. (But) it’s important to realize that this isn’t any different than normal cooking, except that the ingredients aren’t chopped up and whatnot, the machine basically just puts them together in paste form.”
What’s new here
Using 3D printing — also known as additive manufacturing — to produce food is not a new concept. There’s a company using the technology to make plant-based steaks, and pop-up restaurants are offering meals made entirely with 3D printers. A startup makes 3D printed sugar, and its parent company makes machines for other entrepreneurs.
Kyle von Hasseln, CEO of Sugar Lab and Currant 3D said in an email, “3D printed food can disrupt traditional food distribution like regional servers did for the early internet.”
Using 3D printing and lasers, Columbia Engineering’s Creative Machines Lab made a seven-ingredient vegan cheesecake. The final iteration is shown in full size.
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What is unique about Columbia Engineering’s research is that lasers are used to cook the food as it is printed.
“The use of lasers could be an important development,” von Hasseln said, “because the heat they provide can cause a phase change from paste to solid.” This phase change is, of course, crucial to traditional baking – think of the onset of a casserole. “
Creating a piece of cake was the next step in a year-long effort by Blutinger and his colleagues to develop different foods with a greater number of ingredients. His efforts began with learning how to bake different doughs with lasers and has evolved into developing a machine that can process 18 ingredients and print and bake food at the same time.
And he said the method is sophisticated, allowing chefs to use extremely precise amounts of ingredients that can be baked or heated differently from moment to moment.
“It works great at the millimeter level of printing, and you can just control it at a much higher resolution than you would (with an oven or a stove, for example),” he said.
There’s also an option to cook food based on a person’s preferences: “You can customize every little bit (of the cheesecake) if you like.”
For this study, Blutinger and his colleagues experimented with a vegan cheesecake recipe, combining graham cracker paste and other ingredients to create a single, custom dessert piece with flavors like cherry, banana, peanut butter, and hazelnut spread. It took about 30 minutes to make one disc.
Peanut butter is applied to a layer of graham cracker paste as part of the 3D printing process.
In terms of taste, Blutinger compared the experience to Willy Wonka’s chewing gum for a three-course meal — the one that tasted like soup, then roast beef, and finally a blueberry dessert that turned Violet Beauregarde purple in Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . “Blutinger said his 3D printed food offers similar flashes of flavor.
“These waves hit your palate at different times,” he said. “And that’s a really cool part of the printing process, that you can actually localize flavors in the cheesecake.”
The future of 3D printed food
If the concept of cooking with lasers is worrisome, Blutinger added that it’s no different than heating food in a microwave or grilling a dish in an oven with infrared coils. Most of the ingredients his research team used were bought off the shelf at a grocery store with no special additives.
But Blutinger said he also hopes to investigate a nutritional study to analyze how laser cooking might affect eating at the molecular level. That, he said, could go a long way towards increasing the public’s convenience with such a novel method.
Another reason why 3D printing isn’t widely used in the home kitchen is because of the price: these machines still don’t come cheap. The device that Blutinger and his colleagues assembled likely costs about $1,000 — not including the lasers, which can cost as much as $500 a piece, Blutinger said. However, he noted that the price of lasers has dropped significantly in recent years, due in part to advances in Blu-ray Disc players.
“I think the price point is becoming a more reasonable point for a lot of people and for an actual commercial viability standpoint. I think in the next five years or so you’re going to start seeing this technology,” he said.
Columbia University researchers experimented with different ingredients to flavor the seven-ingredient printed dessert.
DR Xiang Zhang, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works on 3D-printed medical devices, agreed that 3D food printers have the potential to make the leap from technical prototype to widespread consumer product by providing the blueprint of products follow like Keurig coffee makers. And he said he’s excited about the concept of a machine that can print food as it cooks.
Still, “there are challenges to solve,” he added. “They need to bring costs down to a level that is acceptable to most people. And then the food has to taste acceptable. … Just getting there can require a long lead time.”
There are incentives to adopt this cooking method, Blutinger said. He found that 3D printing can enable nutrition-conscious eaters to create foods with accurate calorie counts or carbohydrate, fat, and sugar levels. The method could also help people with eating disorders such as dysphagia or difficulty swallowing, he suggests.
However, Blutinger acknowledged that part of his obsession with applying 3D printing in the culinary world stems from his innate desire as an engineer to innovate.
“I think there’s always a desire to integrate software onto previously analog technologies,” he said.
Want some cheesecake but can’t wait for the machine? Here you come from our friends on the Food Network.