Digital Gastronomy - could 3D printing be the next revolution in cooking? | Hacker News Reader

Digital Gastronomy - could 3D printing be the next revolution in cooking?

gizmag.com

13 pointsjacquesm9 comments

Molecular Gastronomy is the most recent innovation in cooking, and some of these techniques are making it down to home chefs. Probably the most relevant is cooking sous-vide, which is vacuum sealing your food and then cooking it in a precise temperature-controlled hot water bath. This is currently pretty expensive (most kits are ~500$), but results in far superior cooking for most foods (especially meat).

3d printing seems far too limited to prepare anything but niche foods - there's only a limited amount of things that can be prepared by being squirted out of tubes.

I feel like a good percentage of the stuff you find in today's supermarket can be made from printable goo. Consider the frozen foods aisle. Industrial plants often reconstitute ingredients to make fairly normal looking piece of "food." Frozen chicken, for example. Why is always the same shape? This device just brings the technology into the home.

I was going to say the same thing regarding sous-vide, but according to Wikipedia, sous-vide was originally invented in 1799, well before microwaves or 3D printing. While it was "rediscovered" more recently, I'd give the authors the benefit of the doubt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous_vide

I like this a lot, but I have to wonder how many dishes are made up entirely of ingredients which qualify as "printable" in this extruded-gel fashion. Possibly it could be combined with a pick-and-place printer for discrete/solid components?

I can see it being the next cool/hip thing. I doubt it'll really be a revolution.

This can only make the fast food industry even faster and more inhumane. And how do you suppose such a machine is supposed to handle meats and vegetables? Even more processed food here we come. I'm usually not one to be anti-tech, but this is one big step towards the goo-drinkers of Wall-E and the fine dining from the film Brazil.

I think the most interesting part of this idea is the ability to individually control the cooking and cooling of the smallest portions of the creation, so that (for example) you could have a perfect, tightly-spaced grid of frozen ice cream and fully-cooked cake, and other never-before-experienced texture and flavor combinations.

The Cornucopia system is one of the first genuine attempts we've seen to produce a machine that can make virtually any dish given the right set of instructions. Sure, it's not going to print you a medium rare steak, but it can reliably and replicably build all sorts of elaborate and complex combinations, precisely mixed and temperature-controlled, that would be near impossible to create using any other cooking process.

Every bit of that paragraph is self-contradictory. First it says it can make "virtually any dish," and next it claims it will build "all sorts of elaborate and complex combinations" that are currently "near impossible."

Knowing something about food preparation and 3D printers would tell you that the two processes are quite different. 3D printers use a limited set of ingredients that have very specific attributes. Food is prepared through the use of an astounding variety of ingredients that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with completely different properties, not to mention the tools, and most importantly, brains and hands that are then involved in combining everything together.

I doubt this thing could make a salad much less "virtually any dish."

The way they've described and designed this contraption, I bet it would fail miserably at preparing most of the dishes you'd find in any decent restaurant. Unless this thing takes up the entire counter space and looks like a disfigured Inspector Gadget, I don't think Chefs have much to fear yet. At least not until consumers develop an appetite for "nutritious goop."

My rant is really addressed to the linked article, which seems to be an abysmal description of what they're trying to do.

It would have been better to link directly to the source:

http://fluid.media.mit.edu/assets/cornucopia/cornucopia_coel...

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