Printed pastries with individually tailored nutrient levels. Ravioli that assemble themselves. Wedding cake toppers that are exact, tiny, renditions of the happy couple. It's all possible thanks to a fresh meeting of taste and technology that has chefs exploring what 3-D printing might mean for the future of food.
"The really exciting thing is the food we can't even imagine today because we don't have any way to make it," says Hod Lipson, director of Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab, which has been working on 3-D food printing for about a decade.
Perhaps one day you'll saunter into your kitchen, load ingredients in a combination printer/cooking machine and flip through scores of recipes before deciding what to print up for supper. You might find yourself eating foods you'd never currently consider, such as powdered crickets printed up as a palatable alternative meat.
Like more traditional 3D printers, food printers work by printing out successive layers of edible material, such as sugar. But the big challenge for companies exploring this is deciding on a viable business model. Should they be selling food cartridges? Recipes? Is this best for restaurants or home cooks?
"That's the part I don't think anybody has really figured out," says Lipson, though he expects the new tech will ultimately take off.
One of the projects aimed at moving 3-D food printing from prototype to plate is a partnership between the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York and 3D Systems, based in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The collaboration is built around the ChefJet Pro, a 3D Systems machine that can print in sugar and is expected to be released by year's end. The company also has a chocolate printer, the CocoJet.
In addition to teaching students how to use the printers, the partnership includes conferences, seminars and internships for CIA students at The Sugar Lab, a 3D Systems facility in Los Angeles which is expected to open in late spring, says Tim Ryan, president of the culinary institute.
Projects done in the meantime include a collaboration with celebrity baker Duff Goldman of Food Network's "Ace of Cakes" that featured a cake sitting on a stand printed out of sugar.
On the savoury side, Barilla is working on 3-D pasta printing with TNO, an applied scientific research organisation. What might that look like? Barilla recently sponsored a contest for 3-D designs and one of the winners was a pasta printed in the shape of a rose that bloomed during the cooking process.
The culinary institute's Ryan acknowledges hopes are high for 3-D food.
"When we talk about 3-D printing people always want to get to what's going to be in 50 years, or 60 years. Will it solve nutritional problems? Is this going to save the environment? The only reasonable answer to that is, 'We don't know,"' he says.
"That said," he adds, "the technology is really exciting."
