chickpea casting

Chickpea casting day #5

Dev

Day #5 Gummy bears

Recipe Jello + gellatin

For this new tests we are going to use gelatin following this gummy bear recipe.

100ml of water, 43gr Jello and 12 gr powder gelatin. Mix gelatin into the cold water and put into low mid fire for 5 to 10 minutes stirring.

For this test we are using a negative glass shot like mould. After pouring the mix looks like:

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This recipe is way more flexible as expected, but we should compare to get a sense of hardness, the mould was not that great to clean. Since the shape did not have an opening the inner chickpea was more tedious to release.

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Chickpea casting day #4

Dev

Day #4 Agar agar + gellatin

Using 8mm walls, lets try to get a agar agar + gelatin design. Procedure pour gelatin and agar agar and put the mould in the freezer directly. Prechill the mould in the freezer before pouring.

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Recipe mix, 50gr of water 1gr of agar agar  + 1 gr of gelatin for elasticity.

We printed two moulds: one was pre chilled in the freezer, mixed poured at 45ºC, not chilled 40ºC.

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After that both moulds go to the freezer for 20 minutes.

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It is way easier to clean (compare to day#3), since the chickpea did not had time to frozen, even washing it with water removes all of it EASILY.

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There were still some air bubbles trapped. But the molded mixed even has the layers pattern!

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Cleaning the not pre chilled mould, feels harder. A water bath chickpea cleans it. Some tiny chickpea parts got embedded into the gelatin mix, so the surface looks dirtier, pretty sure this is because the mould was not pre chilled. Gelatin mixed feels more elastic than plain agar agar, but still brittle. More research aka internet browsing needed to fine tune the recipe.

Wall thickness for the shapes is 8mm and 12mm, a better hydrocolloid mix needs to be found to allow thinner walls without breaking the results during unmoulding.

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Happy for the results.

Chickpea casting day #3

Dev

Day #3 chocolate

Using thinner walls we tested pouring melted chocolate. The wall being < 2mm holds the shape, but  seems to be too thin to hold the pressure from the molten chocolate.

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After letting the chocolate to set we removed the chickpea using a paper towel, maybe a toothbrush would be better in this case. We did two tests, one of them we kept it in the freezer, which was impossible to clean. The frozen test (oval) after 30 minutes out of the freezer, the chickpea puree thaws so since it has more water in eat is easier to clean, also the design is simpler too.

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Chocolate 101 water and chocolate do not play together well, and the moisture from the chickpea puree aint here to help; great that this is just a test. Finished cleaning using tweezers. This feels like jurassic park. Chickpea looks like cookie crumbles.

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LESSON, next time better to print on top of baking paper to be able to release the part easily, it got stocked to the tile.

There were air bubbles trapped during chocolate pouring, that got part of the design broken.

There is quite a need for post processing but eventually the design was released.

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First half positive results!

Chickpea casting day #2

Cooking, Dev,

Day #2 First molds and materials tests

Experiment day one:

1.30h to puree the chickpeas + half a lemon, sieve it and load the capsule. 570gr checkpeas = 1.5 cartridges.

1h to get the right airflow.

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Molds are easy to create. Candy melt is too thick. Agar agar might be cooled otherwise melts the chickpea.

A water issue or heating issue?

After testing with water, wall thickness of 2 mm can not hold. Until here we have been using Curves with just one perimeter. Pumping up the air pressure we could manage to get thicker walls but seems not enough.
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Using 8mm walls, and pouring water into them gave us around 4 minutes window to hold the shape before it collapsed. We tested with plain water. Some chickpea from the walls gets “melts” and gets into the water during the process, weird way to do chickpea infusion 😉

Chickpea casting day #1

Cooking, Dev,

Casting is a really cool manufacturing/rapid prototyping technique where molten material is poured into a mould. Once the material solidifies the original is released. The mould is normally destructed in the release process and not reused.

In our new set of experiments we decided to give a try to chickpea purée as a casting mould material. The pros for chickpea purée is that is cheap, easy to print (if the right precaution are taken) and has enough consistency to print high enough 3d structures that allow us to get bigger moulds. worthy to try, right?

So the ideal process goes like:

  1. Prepare the design we want to cast (software)
  2. Create a mould design based on the previous point design (software)
  3. Print the mould design using chickpea purée
  4. Pour into the mould the material we want for our original design
  5. Clean casting mould and release the design

We do still have some questions in some the previous points, but that is what experiments are! to get answers.

Mould wall thickness? Pouring material? Chickpea purée cleanability? setting time? …

Hoping to get these answers and more in the upcoming experiments days!