Colombian engineers cook 3D printed chicken with robotic laser

China3D printingNet, September 22, engineers at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a method of cooking 3D printed chicken with a software-controlled robotic laser.
The “Digital Food” team at the Creative Machine Lab of Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, explored various cooking methods by exposing the original 3D printed chicken structure to blue and infrared light. Then, they evaluated the differences in cooking depth, color, moisture retention, and flavor of the laser-cooked 3D printed samples compared to oven-cooked meat.

“We noticed that although the printer can produce components with millimeter precision, no heating method has the same resolution,” said Jonathan Blutinger, a PhD student in Lipson Lab and the project leader. “Cooking is critical to the nutrition, flavor and texture development of many foods, and we want to know if we can develop a method to precisely control these properties using lasers.”

Use laser to cook

Lipson’s laboratory has been experimenting with 3D printed food since 2007, during which time the team has developed multi-component printing. Now, engineers are seeking to create suitable technologies for the cooking of 3D printed foods that have the same advantages as traditional cooked meat in terms of texture and flavor.
The team chose chicken as the model food system they studied. After mixing the chicken into a puree, they 3D printed a sample of 3 mm thick and 1 square inch layer by layer. Then, they exposed the 3D printed chicken samples to the blue and infrared light emitted by the laser and found that blue light is good for cooking the inside of the chicken, and infrared light is best for browning the surface of the meat.
Two types of infrared lasers are used in this process, one is near infrared (NIR) and the other is mid-infrared (MIR). It was found that NIR can brown and cook food through packaging.

The engineers evaluated several parameters of the cooking process, including cooking depth, color development, moisture retention and flavor, and compared the differences between laser cooking and stove cooking meat. The research team observed that the structure of chicken cooked by laser was 50% smaller than the structure of chicken cooked on the stove while maintaining twice the moisture content.
According to China3D printingWang understands that laser-cooked 3D printed samples also show flavor development similar to traditionally cooked meat. The two blind taste testers in this study prefer laser-cooked meat to traditionally cooked samples.



A 3D printed chicken sample cooked with a blue laser. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia Engineering.

Although both Lipson and Blutinger are optimistic about the possibilities of their laser cooking technology, the technical content of the hardware and software components used is quite low. The two also pointed out the lack of a sustainable ecosystem to support the technology, and the ability to expand the process made them think deeply.
“What we still don’t have is what we call’Food CAD’, which is a bit like Photoshop for food,” Lipson said. “We need an advanced software that allows people who are not programmers or software developers to design the food they want. Then we need a place where people can share digital recipes, just like we share music.”
Blutinger added: “Food is something we interact with and personalize every day-it seems natural to incorporate software into our cooking to make meal preparation more customizable.”

Eventually, laser cooking technology can be integrated into commercial food 3D printers to provide in-situ cooking when printing meat structures, and even into more traditional kitchen appliances to provide adjustable cooking and more beautiful cooked food customization.
As outlined in the team’s research, future experiments can study the effect of heating on the layer adhesion between successively cooked printed layers, multi-wavelength cooking for penetration and surface heating, reducing cooked and unprocessed The method of cross-contamination between the printed layers, and the food cooling rate. By further exploring these things, researchers will be able to judge the commercialization potential of the technology.
Although chicken was selected for this particular study, the technology may also be extended to other animal protein or food groups.

For more information on this research, please refer to the journal Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-021-00107-1

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