Meringue is a dessert made with egg white and sugar (simple version). It has interesting characteristics and lots of potential as a 3DFP material.
- It can fight gravity, meaning that by itself can hold its shape quite nicely
- After cooking gets a solid form. Even different states (pouching, baking, …)
- It’s not difficult to prepare (worst part is beating eggs)
- Tastes nice just by adding some vanilla extract 🙂
- Has glossy white color, meaning that adding colorant we can get almost any color easily!
So why not? lets give it a try!
My goals with this experiments were to actually “feel” the meringue. Decide if it was easy to extrude and try different cooking methods to solidify it.
There is thousands of meringues recipes on the internet, I chose the simplest one.
How to
Ingredients:
55 grams of sugar for each egg white.
Steps:
Start whipping the eggs until you get soft peaks, after that keep beating slowlier and start adding the sugar. Stop beating once you have stiff peaks.
THATS ALL! now you have your meringue batter!
Results
The answer to the first goal is a BIG yes. Once you got your meringue with stiff peaks, the texture is great for extruding. Its soft but at the same time is thick enough to hold shapes. The texture is something in between honey, ketchup but thinner (best way to know is to try your own 😉 ).
One of the great things about meringue is that by applying heat it gets harder. Different cooking methods can be used.
An oven at low temperatures (around 120-140ºC) and long times (over an hour) dries out the meringues. And gives the airy rock texture (I need to improve my texture descriptions).
Another way is pouching the meringues, using hot water (not boiling). This ones gives a marshmallow texture. This is typically used for floating islands.
Some people use microwaves to cook them, some with water and others with a dfferent ratio for the batter (still need to try both).
Conclusions
Overall It was a nice experimental day with meringue. I think it has the potential to be a nice 3d printed dessert. Now is just a matter of working hard in Pinya2 and test it!
Hopefully soon! 🙂