Abstract
Additive manufacturing of food is a method of creating three-dimensional edible products layer-by-layer. While food printers have been in use since 2007, commercial cooking appliances to simultaneously cook and print food layers do not yet exist. A key challenge has been the spatially controlled delivery of cooking energy. Here, we explore precision laser cooking which offers precise temporal and spatial control over heat delivery and the ability to cook, broil, cut and otherwise transform food products via customized software-driven patterns, including through packaging. Using chicken as a model food, we combine the cooking capabilities of a blue laser (λ = 445 nm), a near-infrared (NIR) laser (λ = 980 nm), and a mid-infrared (MIR) laser (λ = 10.6 μm) to broil printed chicken and find that IR light browns more efficiently than blue light, NIR light can brown and cook foods through packaging, laser-cooked foods experience about 50% less cooking loss than foods broiled in an oven, and calculate the cooking resolution of a laser to be ~1 mm. Infusing software into the cooking process will enable more creative food design, allow individuals to more precisely customize their meals, disintermediate food supply chains, streamline at-home food production, and generate horizontal markets for this burgeoning industry.
Highlights
Digitizing the cooking process using additive manufacturing (AM) techniques and software-controlled lasers enables temporal and spatial control of the arrangement of ingredients and the delivery of heat to raw food with millimeter precision[1,2,3,4]
We performed a series of trials varying laser cooking pattern (Fig. 2a) to characterize energy requirements for laser cooking, ambient cooling effects, cooking pattern efficiency, cooking loss in heated samples (Fig. 2b), color change, and browning capabilities through packaging
To assess thermal energy required for cooking, we traced a spiraling trochoidal path (Fig. 2a) with the blue light over the sample
Summary
Digitizing the cooking process using additive manufacturing (AM) techniques and software-controlled lasers enables temporal and spatial control of the arrangement of ingredients and the delivery of heat to raw food with millimeter precision[1,2,3,4]. Integration of a multiwavelength laser cooker onboard a food printer can provide both penetrative heating and surface browning[6,7,8,9,10], which would generate more creative food combinations and taste profiles. Current food printers do not allow us to print a layer of chicken, for example, and simultaneously reach both the required browning as well as adequate inside cooking temperatures amidst layers of printed carrot purée (Supplementary Fig. S1). Integration of a multiwavelength laser cooker onboard a food printer can skirt this obstacle by providing penetrative cooking and surface browning[3,6,7,8,9,10] (Supplementary Video 1)
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