What Are You Printing for Dinner?.
IN THE OFFICE OF HIS MANHATTAN catering kitchen, Peter Callahan watched intently as I ate a small chicken drumstick off a 3-D printed plastic "bone."
He had one question: "Would you love it more if you could eat the skewer?"
Callahan, a celebrity caterer credited by Martha Stewart with inventing the bite-sized slider, bought his first 3-D plastics printer two years ago to wow guests at a holiday party. Today, he has his sights trained on printing the food itself. He imagined drumsticks with edible bones; could they be made of celery? Blue cheese? Hot sauce? Callahan already makes an edible cracker spoon to use with caviar, but he envisions an entire line of cutlery, plates and menus that could be printed and consumed at parties. He sees mini-milk cartons made of chocolate and Asian-style takeout boxes formed from wontons.
"People like new," he says.
But when it comes to food, most of us still cook like cavemen, over fire. Kitchens are "the most primitive thing in our house," says Hod Lipson, an Israeli engineering professor at Columbia University, who was a pioneer in the field of 3-D printing, and food printing in particular. But soon, Lipson claims, we'll be able to download and print dinner.
Food printers use powders (mostly sugar) or pastes (cooked or uncooked pureed meat, vegetables, grains). The most advanced models have multiple syringes, like printer cartridges, each containing a different ingredient. The syringes extrude the ingredients layer by layer, allowing the printers to build elaborate, computer-generated shapes that would be difficult, if not impossible, to shape by hand or mold. Currently, the food needs to be cooked either before or after printing. But scientists, including Lipson, are working on a printer that cooks as it prints.
Lipson m ade his name by printing robots (an early model made the front page of the New York Times in 2000). A few years later, his students at Cornell University were test-printing with whatever materials they had on hand, which, in a university setting, included Nutella and Easy Cheese. Their edible creations soon overshadowed Lipson's printed robots. Visitors to the lab "would only ask about the cheese," he says.
Lipson's early edible experiments, featuring purple cubes that tasted like broccoli with the texture of milk, were "crimes against the culinary world," says a former student of his. Lipson started developing recipes with chefs at what is now the International Culinary Center, while his students worked on the hardware. At a recent demonstration, I watched Lipson's latest printer extrude uncooked goat-cheese polenta and honey-beet puree into something that resembled a delicate flower or jelly-roll slice. The polenta was then cooked with a blowtorch; the beet was a burst of sweetness inside the stiff, tangy, smoky peaks—delicious, but no better than a non-3-D printed version would have been.
The printer's elegant presentation has made it a potential game-changer in an unlikely arena: nursing homes and hospitals. Problems with chewing and swallowing are widespread, but patients frequently reject hospital mush—the only thing they can eat. 3-D printing cou ld produce elegant, edible dishes with nutritional value calibrated to individual patients. Last year, scientists at TNO, a Dutch research institution, built a 3-D printer that served 100 such customized meals to 20 residents in a German nursing home as part of a €3 million study funded by the E.U.
On the other end of the culinary spectrum, high-end chefs like Callahan are starting to experiment.
At Enoteca, a two Michelin-star restaurant at the Hotel Arts Barcelona, chef Paco Pérez used a 3-D printer for a dish called "sea coral," which featured a puree of sea urchin printed in the shape of a coral frond, topped with whole sea urchins, caviar, hollandaise sauce, an egg and a foam of carrot. The printer was a prototype on loan from Natural Machines, whose co-founder Lynette Kucsma acknowledges that the word "printed" can invoke images of processed food. "I understand why people have negative reactions," she says, but once people start eating printed food in restaurants, "it helps prove the concept."
In a decade Kucsma imagines people scrolling through recipes on couches and printing dinner, making printers "a common kitchen appliance the way that microwaves are today." The scientists at TNO dream bigger. Their "moon target"? The Star Trek food replicator, says Kjeld van Bommel, senior consultant in food printing at TNO. There are some differences, he says, but the general concept—a device that creates specific dishes on command—could be achieved.
Dave Arnold, founding director of the technology department at the International Culinary Center, partnered with Lipson on early printing experiments but came away unimpressed. "It's not adding anything to the art of what I consider making delicious food," he says. "When people say 3-D printing is the future of food—God, I hope not."
According to Arnold, the printer's vaunted precision is precisely the problem: The small nozzle size means that "if anything is in it that's interesting—like pepper or garlic or herbs—it will clog." Most current models require that every ingredient be ground to small particles. "It's good for fish balls," Arnold says of the available technology. "I love fish balls. But fish balls don't need to be shaped like Mickey Mouse."
Write to Sophia Hollander at sophia.hollander@wsj.com
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