If you follow 3digitalcooks, I hope you were aware that during the last edition of the Fabcon3D in Germany we did an awesome week of workshops. Three of them.
This video explain the first 2 days after I land in Frankfurt and met Jason.
Enjoy!
Cooking
3d printed meringue taste experience
More videos from our awesome trip in Germany. Always in a good mood this time we jump to try a new type of recipe. 3d printed meringue! How cool that sounds?? test it during the event turns into a super crunchy experience. Aram Avila, Jason Mosbrucker and Luis Rodriguez give you their honest, or at least tired opinion about them. Better take their work or try to taste by yourself during our next workshop!
Yogurt Bites Recipe
You might have read the recipe for our yogurt bites at Instructables. But this time we bring you the video. Yogurt bites is a recipe made around two main ingredients: Greek Yogurt and cucumber.
Classic, Spicy and sweet. A recipe that was creating during my time at Pier 9, after a legendary talk/inspiration-time with Sherry Wong (You rock).
Classic
Ingredients
- Honey
- Black sesame seeds
- Black salt
- Lemon juice
- Lemon zest
Slice the cucumber. Drip some honey on the center. Print on top of the slice the yogurt pyramid. Drizzle some lemon juice on top. Sprinkle black sesame seeds. Add lemon zest. Finish with some black salt flakes. Done
The balance between the honey and the acidity of the lemon works nicely. The sesame seeds bring a little bit more of texture along the cucumber.
Spicy
Ingredients
- Tabasco
- Dill
- Bacon bits
Slice the cucumber. Place some bacon bits in the center. Print the yogurt pyramid. Using a pipette forced the Tabasco to flow along the pyramid “trenches”. Sprinkle some dill on top. DONE.
This is probably the unexpected one. I like it a lot. Probably my favorite. I hope next time I get to try with crispy bacon bits. PI-CAN-TE!!!
The third and last one is the sweet one.
Sweet
Ingredients
- Blackberry jam
- Mint leaves
- Walnuts
Slice the cucumber. Spread a layer of blackberry jam on top. Place 4 pointy mint leaves on top. The jam will act as a glue, to held the leaves in place. Be creative!!! print the yogurt on top. Place some walnuts around the pyramid. DONE.
This is a sweet bite, well balanced (thanks too the Flavor bible). I think it would be perfect to finish this recipe with some edible gold on top, make it shine!
Let us know if you like đ
Chickpea casting day #2
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.
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.
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 đ
Chickpea casting day #1
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:
- Prepare the design we want to cast (software)
- Create a mould design based on the previous point design (software)
- Print the mould design using chickpea purée
- Pour into the mould the material we want for our original design
- 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 purĂ©e cleanability? setting time? …
Hoping to get these answers and more in the upcoming experiments days!
Printing cookies day #6
Today a new war starts at 3DC đ We are not going to stop until we get a reliable 3d cookie dough that holds its shape once is cooked. Cookies 4 LIFE!!
We are going to start analysing our recipe to see what is the cause that makes our cookies to collapse in the oven.
But first lets learn more about what happens inside an oven baking cookies.
This are the ingredients of our first test cookie dough recipe:
- Soft butter 250gr, confectionary sugar 250gr, 1 egg, flour 600gr and vanilla extract.
For our test we are going to be reducing the amount of ingridients to get less dough. 1/3.
- Soft butter 84gr, confectionary sugar 84gr, 1/3 egg, flour 200gr and vanilla extract.
From all the ingredients butter is the one with lower melting point. And might be the reason why the cookie collapse. Probably not the only one. But the first that affects before the egg protein start tangling together giving more structural support, not sure if its enough, though. So first we are going to test a batch of cookies without butter.
Butter is approximately 16-17% water. Trying to balance the lack of butter’s water we are going to add a whole egg. Hoping the extra egg protein coagulation also helps holding the shape.
- Confectionary sugar 84gr, 1 egg (57gr), flour 200gr, vanilla extract and salt 2gr.
To add extra toughness we are using bread making flour, hopefully the extra gluten will help too holding the shape. Also we are adding salt to strength the gluten network.
Ok. Lets prepare the dough and see the consistency.
After mixing for over 6 minutes the dough does not hold together (crumbles). Since we want to play safe instead of adding water, we are going to add and extra egg.
After the second egg the dough is too soft. Going to add flour one spoon at a time to get the right consistency. 5 spoons later the consistency is better. The dough is elastic but pretty hard.
Setting up to 6 bars the pressure, the extruder can not handle it at enough speed. TOO HARD. We frozen some samples and deepfried one of them it hold its shape properly. Taste more like a dense sweet bread. Another recipe would be needed to test this.
Even if the dough was to thick to print, we manually prepared some cookies to test the results in the oven.
First try. 180ÂșC for almost 20 minutes untils it was brown outside.
Second try. 200ÂșC for 20 minutes. This one is more obvious that has collapsed, but did not had a complete base.
second cookie
Second cookie result
To us it feels almost like bread, with tough crust but with the sugar sweetness. Maybe we should try some bread. Maybe we sould try some breadsticks instead?
Another fail day and one day closer to the solution! More experiments coming soon!
References:
Agar Agar day #4
Fourth day for our agar agar tests. We are back after designing some modifications to have a decent heated syringe and nozzle. Hopefully this gives better results after day #3 disaster.
We are using a common 3d printing heated block, with a convenient air fit connector that has both threaded sides magically equal to our cartridge and heated block ODs.
heating block nozzle
Today we have two goals. First one test if the heated nozzle is enough to avoid clogging issues. Thus test to print a basic cylinder shape. To validate if the new heating design works we are going to run two tests. First load the cartridge with agar agar and see if after 30 minutes the tip is clogged or not. Later run an stalactite test. An hour dripping.
For this test we are using our first day#1 recipe: 100gr of water 2gr of Agar agar. Heating the capsule at 55ÂșC.
Experiment 1
First thing we wanted to try was to hold the liquid into the hot extruder. FAAAAAAAAAAIL. the liquid keeps running without any external force. Their might be some air leakage somewhere. Or maybe the nozzle is not properly screwed to the cartridge body.
Agar agar day 4 test
Experiment 2
After the first experiment success we are going to run some sealing tests. Filling some cartridges to probe that water should not flow through an open nozzle. This is a similar experiment to the upside down glass of water. Definitely there is something wrong with the nozzle sealant. After tighten it, it stops dripping. Finally some good news.
Pressure test
Experiment 3
After the previous issues, we tested to run a basic print with awful results. Controlling the flow with AE is extremely inaccurate, specially for low viscosities. We decided to stop the experiments and pursue a better hardware control for extrusion.
Awful agar agar print
Conclusions
Agar agar is a cool material to experiment with. Adding temperature to work with it is pretty interesting too. But not having the right hardware to follow the experiments makes it pretty difficult. For that we will keep this experiments on-hold until we got a decent extruder tech that permits having a constant flow. Luckily we will be back to play with hydrocolloids sooner than later.
Resources:
Printing cookies day #5 Deep-frying part3
After our first attempt at deep frying printing cookies using batter, we wanted to give it a bigger shot and test a little bit more this post processing cooking technique.
arrow cookie test
arrow cookie test result
We wanted to test a more diverse set of shapes to observe how the hot oil bath affected to them. First we did double check that the batter was the mix that avoid cookies melting. Easy test no batter = melted, with batter holds the shape.
Even if the cookie has been battered any crack of the overlaid batter during the deep fried process might allow the inside of the cookie to scape (melting and leaking) before cooking. That is why with some of the tests ended up with a cookie-batter shell for some parts of the print.
Another important point is that the shape swims freely, thus is hard to keep accuracy (+/- mm) because the bath deforms the print. This is quite obvious in the next pictures.
Oval shape test
Oval shape test result
In the previous pictures is observed how the oval shapes turns into a flatten circle. For this test the cookie was put in the oil and let it swim freely. Our guess, the water boiling from the cookie surface pushes and forces the cookie to move and deform.
To solve that first we tried a dipping the cookie using a wood stick. Forcing the cookie to stay “still” during its bath.
Testing stick-frying
stick test result
We got some better results, meaning not getting a flattened design. After that we tried using a spatula. And finally a deep fryer wire basket (best one). The square shape and the arrow were deep fried using the wire basket. Results were much better specially for the arrow.
square test
square test support
Conclusions
3D printed frozen cookie dipped into batter and deep fried works. We are not going to say is the best digital cooking technique, due to lack of control, consistency and accuracy for the prints. But still is better than flat cookies ;).
Despite the general opinion we do not think deep fried cookies taste bad, they have a crumbly texture, with a crunchy outside. Obviously the type of oil, temperature and how dirty it is has a major IMPACT.
at 3DC we are committed to get a 3d printed cookie recipe that can be baked, so we will proceed on that line even though is try new things.
Printing cookies day #4 Deep-frying part2
We had one frozen cookie left from the first batch. So we decided to give another try to the deep frying technique. Although this time before deep frying we soak the cookie in a batter mix (cold water and potato starch).
Deep fried 3d printed cookie
More?