Cooking

Doughnuts cutted with 3d printed cutters

Doughnut day

Cooking,

Time to time is just nice to focus on one normal recipe and just try to get it right (no 3d food printing here). But obviously we need to add some touches of digital cooking 🙂

Doughnuts cutted with 3d printed cutters

Doughnuts cut with 3d printed cutters

Today it is doughnut day!

We followed this cake doughnut recipe. We must add that we needed extra flour to get similar dough consistency, a part from that the recipe turn out to be great (WIFE APPROVED).

We choosed this recipe because doughnuts are cool, because it is not that difficult, uses baking powder and we could test how that would effect to some 3d printed cutters.

Disclaimer. We are not fans of using 3d printed parts in contact with food, but for once… let’s give it a shot. The goal was to test how shaped doughnuts would hold their shape after being deep-fried.

 We printed square, round and hexagon cutters. We tried to wrap the cutters with plastic film, but was too hard to get it right, next time we will try aluminum foil. Wrapping it would had a food safe material in contact with the food, not an strong believer about this technique but a pastry chef once recommended it, so…

3d printed doughnut cutter

3d printed doughnut cutter

Some insides of the cut dough

Cutting doughnuts 3d printed cutters

Cutting doughnuts 3d printed cutters

Hexagon doughnut

Hexagon doughnut

We did not take more than the first picture of the doughnuts results, we were to busy eating them. we got some instragram video of the process HERE, and the breakfast next day HERE.

Baking powder raised the doughnuts, what is good for the recipe but not so good to keep the shapeS. Also the cut dough is difficult to handle and easy to deform when we put it into the hot oil. Despite these fact the result was visually nice and delicious too!

Collapsed 3d printed cookie

Printing cookies day #2

Cooking, Dev,

After an intense day one of printing cookies. The baking Day #2 had arrived.

Spoiler alert EPIC DELICIOUS FAIL EXPERIMENTS.

Collapsed 3d printed cookie

Collapsed 3d printed cookie

After whole day in the freezer it was time for some baking experiments.

3d printed frozen cookies

3d printed frozen cookies

The set up was easy. A small oven with a thermometer inside and a rough starting baking time for about 10 minutes. It is important to notice that all the cookies where headed directly from the freezer to the oven.

Printed cookie in the oven

Printed cookie in the oven

First try – 175ºC

We had different quality printed cookies. Our first go was with an uneven one.

We placed the cookie on a sheet of baking paper on top of a oven rack on middle height.

It completely collapsed after 3 minutes. First fail, that was showing that the day was not going to be a success day.

Cooking for 10 minutes.

Second try – 200ºC

This one was a better print with better structural shape. It hold its shape until minute 4. Oven rack middle height.

Cooking for 10 minutes.

Third try – 200ºC

Not sure why we decided to use a oven rack, from this test on moving to a flat surface oven tray. Middle height.

This cookie had a good shape, some flaws but not that bad. In between minute 4 and 5 start collapsing 🙁

Cooking for 12 minutes. Base looks overcooks, we guess is due to the higher heat transfer properties of the metal tray vs rack and air.

Fourth try – 200ºC

Running out of Ideas. Lets try printing on top of a ceramic plate, to see having a harder to head element helps preventing the cooking from collapsing (not lots of hope on this).

The shape of this cookie is good.

Middle height on top of a cold tile (freezed for 30minutes). After six minutes collapsed again.

Conclusions

We are getting the feeling we are going to need to tune the recipe ;). Still for our next cookie printing day we have a cool experiment pending first.

As usual, the good thing about 3d food printing is that even if the result does not look as expected, still is edible and delicious 🙂 Also this infinite cookies once collapsed weirdly look like the gmail logo to us.

printed cookies experiments

printed cookies experiments

3d printed cookie

Printing cookies day #1

Cooking, Dev,

Cookies are fun.

Cookie-cutters are fun. Baking cookies is fun. Do we need more excuses to start some printing cookies experiments?

Thanks a lot to Lola’s Cake for helping us out a lot to get into the cookie world.

This are the ingredients for our first try cookie dough recipe:

  • Soft butter (mantega pomada) 250gr
  • Confectionary sugar (azucar glass) 250gr
  • 1 egg
  • Flour 600gr
  • Aroma
printing cookies ingridients

printing cookies ingridients

Mix the butter and the confectionery sugar until you have a creamy texture for 6 to 8 minutes. Add the egg and keep mixing until it is incorporated. Later sieve the flour and add it to the mix until you have a uniform cookie dough. Add aroma.

cookies process

cookies process

Once we have our dough ready is time to check the pressure that our air compressed extruder needs. We are using a 4mm nozzle. And the loaded cartridge weights around 250gr (cartridge + cookie dough).

Wow, it is a thick dough. After some extruding test, consistency is quiet good, but the dough is not elastic enough to hold together. Extruding pressure goes all the way up to 5 bars and the flow it is still quite slow.

Brittle cookie dough

Brittle cookie dough

We added 50ml of milk to the dough and remix. check the side by side pictures.

dough comparison

dough comparison

The dough samples were “hammered” to show how the one with milk (left) is more elastic also has less consistency. Also now with just 2 bars we have enough flow to start printing. For a 4mm nozzle a layer height of 1.5mm seems to give the best results for up to 30mm height.

3d printed cookie

3d printed cookie

We printed 7 cookies that we are going to use in our baking experiments for the next cookie day :).

If you are a regular 3DC reader you must know how we always try to avoid air bubbles, still wondering why?

BOOOOOOOOOM!

Air bubble cookie burst

Air bubble cookie burst

 More food printing experiments for our next printing cookies day.

3D Food Printing Conference

Cooking, Dev,

Next April 21st at Innovatoren in Venlo-Netherlands, the first edition of the 3D food Printing Conference will be held.

Over ten conferences by experts from all over the world will help to discuss and bring 3d food printing from hype to reality. A great event to find out the current status of 3d food printing from key players and hopefully to taste some delicious samples.

Here it is a list of the talks and speakers that we will be able to see during the 1-day event:

  • Jelle Groot, Food & Agribusiness Research and Advisory, Rabobank International​
  • Medical technology to produce beef. Professor Mark J. Post, Maastricht University
  • Industrial food processing with 2D+ printing. Pascal de Grood, CEO, Foodjet
  • 3D food printing in catering and gastronomy. Professor Thomas Lötzbeyer, Applied Science Weihenstephan Triesdorf / Print2Taste
  • When will we 3D print our food?. Luis Fraguada, Robots In Gastronomy
  • The EU project, PERFORMANCE, personalised food using rapid manufacturing for the nutrition of elderly consumers. Pieter Debrauwer, TNO
  • 3D Food Printing, a device of choice inside the smart kitchen experience to improve the culinary practice for nutrition and pleasure. Dr. Dorothée Goffin, Directrice Smart Gastronomy Lab, University of Liège
  • Food printing: opportunities in long term care?. Professor Luc de Witte, Technology in Care, Maastricht University / Hogeschool Zuyd
  • Personalised food concepts and the future of food production. Melanie Senger, University of applied science Weihenstephan Triesdorf
  • Science and principles of food printing. Jeffrey Lipton, Research, Cornell University / Seraph Robotics
  • Experiences with 3D food printing. Frits Hoff, Chairman Board Fablab Benelux and Fablab Maastricht

Thanks a lot to the 3D Food Printing conference for offering us a pass to the conference. We will try to deliver to all you a true insight of what happens there!

Wilton Candy print one

Printing with Wilton Candy Melts

Cooking, Dev,

It is problematic when we visit food stores, specially baking stores, with all the fancy equipment and tons of ingredients we go nuts! Last time we visit one, was inevitable to buy a bag of Wilton Candy Melts just to test some prints with it!

Wilton Candy print one

Wilton Candy print one

And that is what today’s experiment is about. Printing with Wilton Candy Melts.

When you buy candy melts they come in handy packages that look like this. Normally the are used for coating, molding or others. But we wanted to test melting temperature and how fast it sets in order to know if we could try some 3d prints.

First we melt some chips, we could not find many resources,… but the internet pointed a decent melting point between 40 and 50ºC. And that was exactly what we needed. Instructions suggest the use of microwave but we went fancy and did a double boiler water bath.

Melting wilton candy

Melting wilton candy

Our first test were to get a sense on how fast it sets. It took almost 5minutes at room temperature (18ºC). That was not cool. But still we proceed for our first print test at really low speed hoping that would help to set the candy.

Printing wilton candy 5mm/s

Printing wilton candy 5mm/s

FAAAAAAAIL. Printing slowly it gives more time to set BUT, the air compressed extruder is not really reliable at low speeds and pressures. Lots of blobs.

Second test was at 35mm/s.

Printing wilton candy 35mm/s

Printing wilton candy 35mm/s

For this one the definition was better, due to the air compressed extruder works better at this ratio (speed/pressure). But the issue was that the candy had no time to set, so we needed a couple of tries (and let the print to rest for some minutes before moving it) otherwise it collapsed.

So it is winter and we needed a better cooling system…so… we used our window!

Printer window set up

Printer window set up

We got a drop of 5 degrees between the window and the outside. But results were more or less the same. Window prints:

Outter print

Outter print

Wilton candy print

Wilton candy print

Wilton candy print

Wilton candy print

Conclusions

This was a fun one-day-experiment. As always, the biggest challenge is to find a proper way to manage heat transfer and evacuation. Not sure if candy melt is the healthiest thing on earth, but has plenty of colors to play with. So definitely once we fix the cooling issue we will give it another try!

Chocolate Chantilly

Cooking, , , ,

Chocolate Chantilly was part of a failed digital recipe that we are still working on it :(. But it is so great that we wanted to share it with you. Created by Hervé This. Chocolate Chantilly is a mousse of chocolate made just with chocolate and water. Easy and super delicious!

What better way to learn about that from Heston Blumenthal?

It is pretty straight forward, the higher content of cocoa solids the more moussy it will be. To Learn more check the references!

References:

3D food printing at CES 2015

Cooking, Uncategorized

Cool cool cool mo ‘playas in the game! that is what digital cooks need!

This year 3D Systems showed there ChefJet series (available 1/2 2015) and also introduced their Hersheys collabo named CocoJet at CES 2015.

Shout out to Fabbaloo for this awesome pics. The heatsink pic is just sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

Still no sign of the infamous Digital Cook book, will have to wait until they send us our testing unit 😉

XYZ Printing also introduce their upcoming food printer. Best thing is the target priced between 500$ (cool) and 2000$ (not so cool). 3 Capsules with 50 to 100cc, 5″ screen, 200x150x150 mm…

At the end, and as usual, not enough info to truly know what those printers are capable off.

2015 is gonna be an awesome year!