3D printed food is here to stay

Marijn Roovers’ epicurean delights have graced the tables of some of the Netherlands’ finest restaurants. But the food designer’s Chocolate Globe is his most intricate and technologically adva-nced creation.

A chocolate shell, just 0.8 mm thick, is embossed in gold with the chocolate’s continent of origin, and it holds delicacies that symbolise the region. Roovers and chef Wouter van Laarhoven printed it — layer-by-layer of chocolate — on a 3D printer, reports the sceintificamerican.com.

Roovers is at the forefront of a small group of gourmets and technophiles who want to revolutionise how food is prepared. On April 21, they gathered in the Netherlands for the first conference dedicated to the 3D printing of food.

Later this year, Natural Machines in Barcelona, Spain, will try to bring the technology into household kitchens when it begins selling Foodini, its 3D food printer aimed at consumers.

Then there is the matter of texture. Most 3D printers work with either pastes or powders, so the resulting food tends to be mushy, says Julian Sing, founder of 3DChef, a firm near Tilburg, Netherla-nds, that specialises in 3D printing of sugar.

But there are signs of progress. Debrauwer says that his researchers have been playing with parameters such as the amount of air trapped in the food, the density of the food and the amount and length of fibre it contains to modify the texture. .

In the meantime, 3D-printing aficionados are already trading recipes on the Internet. Some are experimenting with unusual ingredients. Debrauwer says that his lab mates once gave him a wafer printed with protein harvested from ground-up insects. “It tasted quite good.”

Not everyone is so adventurous. Lipson says that for a time his lab experimented with creating foods using “those ingredients you don’t recognise on the back of a food label”. The results were interesting but strange, he says. A purple cube that tastes of broccoli may be delicious but pose a psychological barrier. “It’s edible,” he says, “but when you eat it you feel very uncomfortable.”

Roovers says that his globes tasted akin to aerated chocolate bars. But he is not too worried about how customers will handle new textures and colours: they are accustomed to bright colours and odd shapes in cakes and confectionery, he says.