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3D Printers Making Inroads In Kitchens
mpicpp sends an article from Fortune about the tiny industry springing up around food-related 3D printing. While such devices are still too expensive and too special-purpose for home kitchens, professionals in restaurants and large cafeterias are figuring out ways they can automate certain time-intensive tasks. For example, pasta: "If the user is making a recipe for ravioli, for instance, the [device] prints the bottom layer of dough, the filling and the top dough layer in subsequent steps. It reduces a lengthy recipe to two minutes construction time and ensures that no one has to clean a countertop caked with leftover dough and flour." The companies developing these 3D printers hope they'll be this generation's version of the microwave, gradually finding a use in almost every kitchen.
better than beta, worse than it was. HOWEVER, I'm patient and hope they sort out the bugs. I'm not "You are posting: as NotInHere Anonymously". I'm posting as NotInHere.
What's that damn printer doing making roads in my kitchen?!?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It reduces a lengthy recipe to two minutes construction time and ensures that no one has to clean a countertop caked with leftover dough and flour."
On the other hand, it also ensures that someone has to clean the dough and flour out of the 3D printer.
that you would want in your kitchen, and in particular not in your food.
Instead of having to clean a counter top, you only have to clean various hoppers and extruders, and the build plate. And all the prep tools and bowls. And you'll also have to program in all the steps. and it will only print one at a time.
It's so much easier than that 'old fashioned' way!
There is no way this would replace a commercial pasta maker in any kind of large scale restaurant.
For a start no one makes dough on a bench if you are making quantities of pasta. Either you buy the pasta in or you use a machine. You feed your mixer the ingredients and then collect the dough later. This goes double for you extruded pasta and your filled pasta. Have a look at a Raviolatrice. That is what you use if you are making large amounts of ravioli.
If you want large quantities of extruded pasta you would use something like a Bottene PM80 which will make 15kg of pasta an hour.
test before submitting slashcode please.
Now why why hell would I want a road in my kitchen and how in the hell is a 3d printer going to help me do that?
How can a 3D printer make dough? Something that is made up of multiple ingredients and requires mechanical force (kneading) to develop the gluten proteins that hold it together doesn't sound like the job of a 3D printer. Unless the 'printer' is rolling out sheets of pasta from dough fed to it, in which case it's a ravioli machine which has been around for decades...
Really? You roll out the dough, spoon in the filling, put the dough on top, use cutter.
What the fuck is it with this endless series of bottom of the barrel, idiotic 3D printing stories?
sheet cakes have already had printers for quite some time now, but its worth noting you still need to prepare the ingredients for this device. If i were at home this printer would be cumbersome, but I also work in a professional kitchen and as a chef, If im catering for 120, having a machine that would print gold leaf would be awesome. Petit fours are a pain in the ass, and every time i send my crew to make them i get a round of angry scowls. Having a rack of foodinis printing them off though? yes please. My prep work isnt of concern as most of the ingredients go through a hobart mixer or robot coupe. where this device would shine is tedious, labour intensive hand prep and finishing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I cook pretty much every night (other nights being leftovers or dinner out with a friend), and never make things like ravioli because I hate spending an hour making the damn things for 5 minutes of eating pleasure.
Give me a printer that can make me some ravioli, lasagna, etc, and then pop a couple pieces into the dishwasher and HurryUpAndTakeMyMoney.jpg.
Yay Beta is gone, but did you guys have to push to a live production server with these bugs?
Where's your pink sombrero supply?
And you still have a ton of whitespace.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Of course, the dream would be able to 3D print chocolate/sugar sculptures, but I've been seriously considering how feasible it would be to create custom chocolate/sugar molds to create things like eggs, etc that go beyond what we can get from the usual suppliers and without having to fork out a few grand for a one-off custom design elsewhere. A couple paying jobs and I imagine a 3D printer would pay for itself for this particular aspect of my interests. :)
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
LOL ... since when do chefs have time to hang out on Slashdot? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
More on topic, I don't see how 3D printing pasta is going to work, for example. You're going to probably end up with some slime which comes apart when you cook it.
It won't be an actual dough, it's going to be ... well, I don't know what exactly. I just don't see this retaining the properties of dough.
I can see some of the molecular wizards like Wylie Dufresne or poeople like that, doing wacky things .. but the example of ravioli just seems like this wouldn't work at all.
This sounds more like the domain of crap food made at commercial scales, than actual good food prepared by chefs.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The creators of the printed ravioli were very enthusiastic about their product. "It's almost as good as Chef Boyardee!", they exclaimed. :P
*Blech*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
With mod points loaded, I'm having signatures viewing on top of 'Reply to this' link, and the mod dropdown box is positioned a few pixels low. I also don't see the Preview Options Cancel button controls until I mouse over them when I post the comment after mod points have been used (this may be intentional).
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
It won't be an actual dough, it's going to be ... well, I don't know what exactly. I just don't see this retaining the properties of dough.
Why wouldn't it? I've used a cookie press for years. The dough that comes out of it acts like any other sugar cookie dough, and the cookies are much better than anything that comes in a plastic package. Dough in general is very amenable to be smushed, smashed, mushed, and extruded. Every kind of noodle made is extruded, after all.
You didn't read the parent post very closely, either, or you would have noticed that chefs use a TON of machinery. Chefs have been using machines to make stuff for a couple of hundred years. Other posters have already pointed out that there are specialty ravioli-making machines, for both large and small scales. "3D printing" for food is more like "robot that assembles food" than it is like plastic 3D printing, and that's a very reasonable progression of a very long term trend.
If you've ever watched one of those TV shows about catering, you would have a better idea of the possibilities. There are all kinds of things that a chef would be happy to assign to a robot, rather than a junior staff member, were a robot available. The OPs example of petit fours is one of many.
Remember all those stories about robots taking low skill labor jobs? Remember Humans Need Not Apply? This is that process in action.
Assuming, as other people have pointed out, that its programming interface is within the grasp of your typical chef and that loading and cleaning it is no harder than loading and cleaning a stand mixer. It will be a while before they reach that stage.
... "Just Plain F***ing Awesome" :)
Do you even lift, bro?
Why did they hide it? Surely this kind of thing should have been a front page post. Why put it in the damned journal?
so you have to make the pasta, make the filling, then load the machine with dough and filling, then wait two minutes per ravioli, then apply pressure to each one to check it is sealed and waterproof then drop them in the water to cook them. Or, seeing as you have made the dough already, roll it out, pop it over a ravioli tray http://www.amazon.co.uk/World-... put a spoonfull of filling in each bit and roll over another sheet of pasta, job done 12 at a time.
I can see 3d printing as being interesting for high end intricate and decorative chocolate/sugar creations. Most pasta is formed by extrusion anyway, and you probably could do something interesting with 3d printing pasta, but not ravioli.
Specifically I was thinking of the fact that 3D printing tends to want to lay down a little layer at a time, instead of a continuous sheet as you need to have in ravioli. Otherwise the dough would simply all apart.
Are you a condescending asshole in real life, or just the internet?
I know a lot about food and cooking, as well as the machines used for it ... 3D printing, as it applies to food, a little less.
So, if this machine is going to roll out a continuous sheet of pasta onto a tray with indentations, pass over that and put in the topping, and then roll out a continuous sheet on top .. well, that's not so much 3D printing as robotic assembly.
If it's going to lay down a tiny little layer of pasta dough in successive layers ... well, you're not going to get a coherent dough, you're going to get the slime I alluded to when you try to boil it.
I have no problem with the concept of a pasta making machine ... I've seen machines which make tortelloni. I've also seen machines which make ravioli. They're both really cool, and work with the pasta as a continuous sheet as you need to so that it stays together.
But when you describe something as 3D printing, and all it's doing it rolling out a sheet of pasta ... to call it "3D printing" is to kind of abuse the term. There are already machines which make those pastas on commercial scales, has been for a very long time.
What I'm skeptical about is if this is actually "3D printing" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This device makes sense for situations where arranging the food is where the effort liesâ"delicate cookies shaped like snowflakes and portraits of the bar mitzvah boy sculpted in chopped liver. But for things like a pizza or ravioli or cookies that can be laid out in no time with a spoon or a pasty bag it's a waste of time.
It's not like you load the thing with food elements like flour, eggs, cheese, and spices and ravioli comes out. It doesn't make food, it only squirts out food that's already made. The video's enthusiasm about how one is eating all sorts of wonderful fresh ingredients is irrelevant because one has to make that stuff anyway before it goes in the machine.
I can see this being an interesting tool for fancy restaurants that would like to make breadsticks that look like coral and other instances where people pay for presentation for itself, but being adopted in homes like the microwave was? I just don't see the value.
What the fuck is it with this endless series of bottom of the barrel, idiotic 3D printing stories?
For all of recorded history, medical luminaries have done vivisection on things to learn by looking at cross sections. It takes a special type of person to do this calmly. Arby's has this hypnotic machine that renders part of an animal into perfect slices, exploding the animal-flesh surface area for maximum release of flavor, but we would not want it to happen to us. MRI machines produce animations that when played along the Z axis, look like your internal organs are morphing into some horrifying Cthulhu, your own kidneys become accusing eyes drilling into your soul. William Gibson imagines nanowire weapons that pass through objects with practically zero resistance, rending a man so completely in half that the upper half slides disgustingly down the bottom half as the doomed victim's face shows mere surprise. Trypophobia (fear of holes in places where holes should not be) is likely an ancient fear-response to help one recognize, imagine the possibility of and therefore avoid severe injury, disfiguring or flesh-eating diseases. So over the course of evolution up to the present level of sentience, the sight of cross-sections of things has made us feel uncomfortable.
That is why the idea of building things up (somehow) from cross sections is oddly fascinating. We are crafting a process by which this instinctual horror is reversed. It is cathartic. Unlike horticulture, where you merely combine seed and shoot and watch as the life process does all the work, grows the result, 3D printing is a purely mechanical building process, one in which the inventor must realize the complete structure of a functional item.
3D printing carries the potential to help us atone for the guilt of pulling so many helpless things apart over the years and cutting them into little bits. It helps us to imagine a karmic balance in the world, where on one hand people are running around with machettes slicing shit up, while in the laboratory (or the kitchen!) forward-thinking peoples are watching over intricate machines that reassemble, repair and "revivify" these things.
I, for one, look forward to eating a beautiful juicy steak
that tastes like glop the printer squeezed out of its cartridges.
Slice it thick, Ma!
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>