Fans of the kitchen from The Jetsons and food “Replicators” from the Star Trek franchise may soon be able to digitally print dinner – and heat it at the touch of a button. Engineers at Columbia University have taken a step toward making those sci-fi meals a reality by creating a single device that can use a 3D printer to assemble food and lasers to cook it. The Columbia “Digital Food” team, led by mechanical engineering Professor Hod Lipson, has been working on 3D-printed foods for nearly 15 years and is now experimenting with multi-ingredient printing. “Cooking is essential for nutrition, flavor and texture development in many foods, and we wondered if we could develop a method with lasers to precisely control these attributes.” “What we still don’t have is what we call ‘Food CAD,’ sort of the Photoshop of food. We need a high-level software that enables people who are not programmers or software developers to design the foods they want,” Lipson said. For his study, published in npj Science of Food, chicken was put through a blender and then extruded through a 3D printer nozzle. Scientists tested a range of cooking depths, moisture retention, flavors and color development options and compared laser-cooked and conventionally cooked foods.

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