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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Megan Giller

Interview With the Greats: Dave Arnold on Innovation in the Kitchen

Dave Arnold never stops. The fortysomething owner of Manhattan cocktail bar Booker & Dax is exactly the kind of madman inventor that we need to push the food world forward, and lucky for us, he’s always working on a cool project. Even luckier, he always wants to tell you all about it.

Arnold is also the director of the Museum of Food & Drink in New York City, the host of Heritage Radio Network show Cooking Issues, and the author of Liquid Intelligence: The Art & Science of the Perfect Cocktail. He’s inspired an entire generation of chefs to innovate with technology in their search for ever better food and drinks, with wacky inventions like the Searzall blow torch for your steaks and milk-washed spirits for your cocktails. (And he’s working on a centrifuge for restaurant and home use!)

We sat down with Arnold a few weeks ago to talk shop about the future of food and technology. Here’s an abbreviated version of our conversation.

TheSpoon: Do you see a difference between technology for professional kitchens versus for home kitchens?

Dave: One-hundred percent. It can go both ways. In a professional kitchen, if something’s accepted, people will learn how to use it, because they have to. People in professional kitchens put up with things that you’re not allowed to sell to people at home, things that are very hot or very large or take a lot of energy.

The problem with restaurants is that chefs are extraordinarily busy, and they don’t trust that every one of their employees is a rocket scientist. So stuff in a restaurant has to be fairly intuitive to use and bulletproof. It has to withstand intense abuse. That’s why if you take off the label that says Vitamix and put on one that says Vitaprep, the price goes way up and the warranty goes way down, because everyone knows that in a commercial establishment, people beat the heck out of things. Commercial equipment needs to have a level of robustness and intuitive use that is not necessary for home equipment.

But home equipment — it depends on who you’re shooting at. When you’re shooting at people who aren’t avid cooks or who don’t cook that much, it has to be intuitive at home in a different way. It has to have a lot more convenience and bells and whistles on it. It has to polish out nicely, to tell you when your breakfast is done. Also, most home equipment is built around maximizing kitchen space, which is super important commercially as well, but typically home people don’t have to put out as much product out of a particular square footage. You’re maximizing a different problem.

Where it can get interesting is, you can have something that home people can experiment with because maybe you can’t make that much of it, so it’s hard to do in service because the product takes too long or maybe it’s a little too complicated to train everyone on. So things that I can do at home better than in a commercial kitchen? Rotary evaporation. It’s illegal to do rotary evaporation in a commercial kitchen because you’re doing distillation. But at home you’re dealing with a tinkerer. Someone who sees themselves as a learner, a hobbyist. There’s a weird sweet spot there for home people to do interesting things that are difficult to do in most commercial restaurant environments. Because as much as commercial restaurant environments are creativity driven, it’s business, and it’s hard to justify the cost of building in super-high levels of creativity.

Molecular Cocktails from Booker & Dax with Kate Krader and Dave Arnold

Molecular cocktails from Booker & Dax with Kate Krader and Dave Arnold; photo courtesy Flickr user Meng He

TheSpoon: Let’s talk about that creativity.

Dave: In the wake of the popularity of the Spanish style at El Bullí, there were a bunch of people who had positions in higher-end restaurants as research chefs. Not the way Chipotle would have a research chef; it was specifically for fine dining. I don’t really know how that trend is doing now, but it’s hard: Customers’ interest in visibly creative stuff goes up and down. Everyone always wants something to be different and new, but sometimes they want it to be different and new in a way that doesn’t look like people have been hypercreative with it, and sometimes they want hypercreative.

Look at the mid 2000s , with WD50, Alinea, Moto: All over the country a lot of the new techniques were being used and pioneered by restaurants that weren’t advertising that that’s what they were going to do. Modernist Cuisine is fairly good at documenting where a lot of these recipes came from. You can treat it as a library of where these ideas came from.

Even Michael Laiskonis at Le Bernadin was using hydrocolloids a lot. Dominique Ansel at Daniel, Greg Brainin at Jean-Georges. All the cooks who went there were smart people interested in these new techniques because they knew it would allow them to achieve something different, new and good. None of those folks were using it in very obvious ways that said to the customer, “This is using a new technique.” That’s what I mean by the hypercreativity isn’t always obvious.

When it is obvious, and people are actively trying creativity that way, there tends to be acceleration of what happens. People push the boundary faster and harder, make more mistakes frankly, so you try 10 things that suck and come up with 1 good thing. If you can do that you’re super winning.

TheSpoon: Right now with connected kitchen appliances it seems like everyone is trying way more than 10 things. How do we move away from gimmicks into useful technology?

Dave: I have a particular opinion on this. Ninety-nine percent of the applications that people are positing today will be the future, are not the future. If they are the future, God help us. It’s so dystopic that would someone would print your meal out. It’s a horror show. Luckily I don’t anticipate you ever pushing a button and it printing whatever paste it has, applying food coloring to it to make it look like a hamburger, and then you eat it.

The current printing technology is either working with liquids (in that case it sucks because you need your viscosity to be right), or you’re dealing with paste that has to be extruded through a very fine nozzle. There’s only so much you can do with current technology.

True, that technology will change and get better. Let’s say someday you could find what you think is going to be the best-tasting pig and then recreate it a million times with a transporter beam where you store the information and keep recreating it over and over again. Or maybe it’s the best meal ever. It would be like a CD player of meals: You could have your favorite chef create it, scan it, and then whenever you want, you could just have it. When you get to that level, sure, print me some food.

The issue isn’t that the current technology sucks (which it does) or that the way people are using the current technology is wrong and bad (which it most certainly is). All that’s important is that you push the technology. Someone will find a good use.

Look at the development of almost anything: Steam engines sucked for a while until someone got one that worked right. You need to have the person who has no idea what’s going to happen in the future just work. They need to work and make stuff and throw stuff against the wall and see what happens: Push technology, create. Eventually someone will do something amazing.

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The Searzall in action; photo courtesy Flickr user Arnold Gatilao

We all have to play this game. Well, I don’t tend to play it, but most of us play it, where we pretend that the gimmick idea is reasonable when we all know it’s not. Of course it’s not reasonable!

Remember when they had the first car phones? If you had said, “That’s dopey, who the heck is going to use that?” we’d never have what we have today. Or as I said when I was a teenager in the 80s and somebody showed me email and I was like, “That’s not ever going to go anywhere.” Who knows? That person was wrong about why it was going to be great. The person who showed me had no understanding of how the technology was actually going to change the world, but they just kept at it.

TheSpoon: Are there certain food-tech trends that you’re excited about?

Dave: There’s stuff that I thought was going to have a lot of potential for a long time and never has. If you’d asked me over 10 years ago, I’d say by now almost everything would be completely traceable, RFID and that safety would be on lockdown and that we wouldn’t have recalls and all of this other nonsense. Once everything is traceable that way, I’d assumed we’d already be in a situation where — and we’re getting there — your grocery list would be more integrated with what you’re doing.

I didn’t expect FreshDirect and Peapod and all that to make as big a dent as it did, in the same way that I didn’t understand how the whole retail world was going to get flipped by Amazon the way it did 10 years ago.

Especially because in the late 90s, there was Urbanfetch. I was like, “Oh yeah, this is never going to work. You’re going to be connected on your computer and someone’s going to go show up in half an hour with your ice cream.” I used to mess with them. You weren’t allowed to tip them and they had no minimum order. So I was like, “It’s 4 AM. I’m going to hit this button, and you’re going to deliver me a pack of gum in half an hour?” The guy’s like, “Yes.” And they showed up with the gum and I’m like, “And I’m not allowed to tip you?” He’s like, “Nope.” And every time they were late they’d give you a free pint of ice cream. It’s a crazy business model. They were losing money, but that was back when people thought it was okay to lose money as long as you lost it in very large quantities. That was a sign that wasn’t going to work. That means someone comes along and does it right, like FreshDirect.

Here’s another situation where I was totally wrong. Who’s going to order vegetables off of a website? Turns out everybody, except me.

Most of the time, on these kinds of predictions, I’ve been wrong.

The only time I’ve been right — I predicted low-temperature sous vide cooking is going to grow and it’s here to stay. And that people will be interested in the why of cooking. It’s not a fad. The general trend is toward deliciousness. I think I’ve been proved right on that.

Let’s Talk About Flavor for a Second (VIDEO)

Lately when I talk to chefs and home cooks about the type of food they want to make, I keep hearing the words “like my grandma used to make.” It’s become shorthand for all-natural, healthy food with honest flavor, created using painstakingly slow processes.

I’m totally on board, except for that last part, about the analog attitude. There’s so much technology that can vastly improve the taste and flavor of your food, so that it’s like what your grandma used to make, but even better.

Take a device like the pressure cooker. “A pressure cooker can produce exceptionally tender results while maximizing the flavor extracted from the ingredients,” writes molecular gastronomy guru Heston Blumenthal in the foreword to the Fast Slow Pro brand manual. Sure, you could spend more than 12 hours making chicken stock — or you could get even richer flavors in 1 hour with a pressure cooker, especially one with a screen that gives you instructions and tells you when everything is finished cooking. I recently started using one and have been astounded at the flavor of the foods I make in it: creamy roasted potatoes, intense stock, tender octopus, you name it. Grandma may not have cooked this way, but her recipes would have been even better if she had.

There’s another reason the analog logic doesn’t quite make sense: Grandma (or maybe great-grandma) used to grow her own tomatoes or buy them from a farmstand down the street. Now we go to a megagrocery store to get those tomatoes. “Our food system is not designed for taste and flavor. It’s designed for travel,” said Jennifer Broutin Farah, the CEO of SproutsIO, at the recent Smart Home Summit (watch the video below). That means the food we eat tastes more like cardboard than carrots, cucumbers, or kale. No wonder no one wants to eat their vegetables.

SproutsIO’s connected system makes it easy for everyone (black thumbs included) to grow their own produce at home: The device helps you grow vegetables and fruit from seeds in its modular system, and its smartphone app gives you real-time data about how it’s going. Plus it learns from you to help you grow better. The idea is that if those vegetables and fruits were easy to grow and tasted better, everyone would want to eat them, improving their overall health.

And it’s only one of many kitchen gadgets and products designed to improve your experiences with food, whether that’s growing, cooking, or eating it, to change our diabetes- and obesity-laden country into a healthier one. After all, as Farah said, “small-scale solutions that have high leverage can create great impact.”

These Design Trends Will Help You Create a Winning Product (VIDEO)

So you’ve finally finished creating your connected kombucha maker! But there’s only one model, it feels pretty cheap, and the app interface is built into the side of the device. Hmmm. According to Carley Knobloch of HGTV Smart Home, consumers may not be so excited about your product.

At the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit (watch the video below), Knobloch detailed the latest trends that can make a product stand out from the crowd.

“It should really be a sensory experience that tells our body in every way that we are home,” she said.

Personalization

First off, that means it should be unique to each person’s home. Consumers are looking for custom looks and features “so that everything looks as unique as the person,” Knobloch said. “The more you can accommodate different features and the ability to change features depending on every person’s or family’s needs, the better,” making the customer a partner in the design experience and that much more invested in your product.

This flexibility for the oh-so-precious millennials, who want an authentic space, as well as boomers, who are all about individualism. Two age groups, one stone.

Sensory Experience

Don’t stop at the visuals. Consider the sounds your product makes to create a happy Pavlovian response. Pay attention to touch, “the weight of it, does it feel substantial or does it feel flimsy; what’s the quality of the finishes, do they look polished do they look casual; is it fun to touch the touchscreen?” Knobloch asked.

She said that natural products are very en vogue at the moment: bamboo, plant life, woven baskets, pottery, macramé. Just as valuable: touchless faucets, induction burners, disappearing devices that can hide behind cabinets.

The Right Kind of Smart

Most of all, consider what kind of connectivity your consumers want. “They don’t want smart that isn’t future-proof,” she said, and “they don’t want smart that doesn’t respect their privacy.” On the other hand, they want smart that connects them with their food (think grocery shopping, meal prepping, and knowing what’s in their fridge) and smart that connects them to their family and the world.

Follow these guidelines and your connected kombucha maker might just become a hit.

21st Century Vending: How Sprinkles’ Standalone Cupcake ATM Works

The cult of the Sprinkles cupcake ATM casts a wide net, entrancing hungry dessert lovers all over the country with its sweet treats available even at 2 AM. The cupcake chain already has 11 ATM locations and will have 14 by the end of 2016.

In August the cupcake chain decided to expand its batter horizons with its first standalone cupcake ATM, on the University of Southern California’s campus. They’re using this one as a test to see if they can maximize sales at a high-traffic area where they don’t have room and budget to build a big bakery. It’s an innovative business model — and certainly beats that Snickers bar shoved down your throat on your way to Spanish 101.

Here’s an inside look at how the ATM works.

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The bakers arrive before 2 AM to start baking for the day. Here’s the most popular cupcake: red velvet with cream cheese icing. Look at that spread!

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Each cupcake is placed in an individual box and placed in the ATM. An ATM can hold 400 to 800 cupcakes, but Sprinkles says it rarely fills them to the brim, preferring to restock several times per day to make sure the cupcakes taste fresh. Apparently each ATM can go through 500 to 1,000 cupcakes in a day. We’d love to show you what the inside of the ATM looks like, but Sprinkles says this information is proprietary and SECRET. Think a giant robotic arm that suctions the box up and moves it through the machine to the customer dropbox, then places it in the window, which opens when there’s a cupcake. Sprinkles worked with industry experts for a year and a half to develop this technology. “it’s simple but high tech, due to the fragile nature of cupcakes,” said VP of marketing Nicole Schwartz.

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The cupcake ATM doesn’t actually MAKE cupcakes. So someone from a Sprinkles bakery in downtown L.A. has to schlepp them across town to the USC campus. Not exactly the best use of technology, time, or manual labor, but until we get better at food tech, this will have to do.

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Many, many people make the pilgrimage to the ATMs each day. At the other locations, which are adjacent to a bakery, there’s often no line to go INSIDE the bakery but a long line to use the ATM. The busiest times are when the bakery is closed: late at night and early in the morning.

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Sprinkles says it actually had to make version 2.0 to allow a customer to buy 4 cupcakes at a time, since people were running through the screens over and over again to GET MORE CUPCAKES. (Photo courtesy Flickr user The All-Nite Images)

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Several screens walk you through the cupcake choosing and buying process.

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The box is here! The box is here! (Photo courtesy Flickr user Urban Sea Star)

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Happy USC students. Not pictured: face-planting into the cupcake.

Eat My Face: I made a 3D-Printed Pancake Selfie With the PancakeBot

This series explores the world of 3D printing through the most navel-gazing image possible: the selfie.

He seemed surprised that I wanted to eat it. I was standing in the middle of Storebound’s New York City offices with a plate of my face in pancake form hot off the 3D printer, staring at the guy who’d just helped me engineer my breakfast.

“Do you have any maple syrup?” I asked.

I had been waiting for this moment for a while. As soon as I’d heard about the PancakeBot, a gizmo that would PRINT PANCAKES, I’d known those flapjacks were in my future.

You start by either choosing a design from the archives or drawing an original image with the PancakePainter app. I’d used the PancakePainter to make a pretty rooky cartoon of myself.

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Save it to an SD card, pop it in the printer, and hit a few buttons and the PancakeBot draws the image in batter onto a griddle: A pump forces the air into the nozzle holding the batter, causing it to dispense, and a vacuum keeps the batter in place. The printer moves the nozzle over the griddle, tracing the lines you drew on your screen. Dark lines on the image are painted first so the batter can cook longer while lighter sections on the image are painted last. Here’s a slick video to explain the process.

After an inventor named Miguel Valenzuela made the first version out of LEGOs for his daughters, Storebound started working with him on a Kickstarter to see if there was demand. Turns out there was: In less than 30 days more than 2,000 backers pledged more than $460,000, and they’ve sold more than 1,000 units at $300 a pop. Now you can get a pancake printer at a Sears near you (and a host of other places). Legal firms, small businesses like bakeries, and even a 3D-car-printing company have all bought one, as well as many families.

Storebound says they see this as an educational product, something designed to get kids and adults into the kitchen and teach them about viscosity, temperature, and pressure. Sure, that might be true for a few minutes when they first pull it out of the box, but let’s call this what it is: novelty. More disturbing to me is the idea that we’re trying to teach kids how to cook without considering the actual ingredients they’re cooking: Storebound demoes the machine with Aunt Jemima’s, which they water down so that the finished product resembles something somewhere between a crepe and a pancake. You could use your own scratch-made batter to step it up a notch, but that’s clearly not the point of the printer. To me the most exciting thing about 3D printing in the kitchen is that it will elevate food by making it easier to prepare or better-tasting, not that it will become a onetime gimmick.

PancakeBotPrinting

After waiting about 10 minutes for my pancake to print, I couldn’t wait to bite into it. What I tasted was kind of like a flat, soggy animal cracker with alternating crispy and doughy bites. In other words, the PancakeBot might get you pumped about your breakfast, but in the end you’ll probably go hungry.

This L.A. Shop Makes Ice Cream By Bike Power

Gears. That’s the first thing you see when you walk into Peddler’s Creamery in downtown Los Angeles. Also wheels upon wheels and chains upon chains, strung together across the room and up and down walls to create an elaborate “kinetic sculpture,” as Edward Belden, the store’s babyfaced owner, calls it.

They might seem ornamental at first, a nod to Belden’s love of bicycling and hipster culture at large. Even the old Schwinn itself, hanging out in the corner of the store by a window and a brightly colored collage, might seem like a prop. Until you realize that everything is connected, and those chains and wheels travel the length of the store through the walls to the back, where they power an ice cream churner and literally make ice cream by bike power—as long as someone is peddling.

Peddler's Creamery | Artisan Ep. 8 | COIN

“This project is about bringing together three things I love: ice cream, bicycling, and creating a sustainable world,” Belden said. After getting a masters in environmental science, the earnest thirtysomething found himself working for a public research interest group. “But I wanted to think of a more creative way to reduce our footprint,” he told me. He’d never forgotten his first job, working for a Baskin Robbins, and his first bike, which he paid for by recycling cans and bottles.

So he quit his job and built a modified tricycle that churned ice cream while it peddled, then took it out on the streets of L.A. Soon Peddler’s Creamery became more than a trike; Belden opened a brick-and-mortar store in 2013, with a bike contraption that still churns all of the ice cream. “We want people to walk away knowing they consumed something that’s good for the planet but tastes amazing,” he said.

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How does it work? The chains travel from the modified bicycle’s gears across the shop and through the wall into the back, where Belden has hooked up a churner with a bucket chain that requires old-fashioned rock salt and human elbow (er, knee) grease to operate. The patent for this contraption is pending, and at some point Belden hopes to power the entire store not by electricity but by bike.

On any given day you’ll find customers snapping selfies on the bike, then realizing, “Hey, this thing actually does something!” It only takes 20 minutes to make a batch, and peddling a whole one earns you a free scoop of ice cream. That means everyone from the neighborhood comes to coast on the bike: government workers, young professionals, folks who live in the housing project upstairs, and, of course, the hipster bike enthusiasts with one pant leg rolled up. “I think it’s because of the ice cream,” Belden explained. After all, how could anyone resist banana-chocolate-chip, candied kumquat, and even maple-bacon-pancake, made with vegan bacon?

“It’s a healthier alternative,” Belden said. “You make and eat ice cream on a calorie-neutral and carbon-neutral budget.”

Connectivity Should Add Value, and Other Lessons We Can Learn From Juicero’s Business Model (VIDEO)

When Doug Evans decided to start a new company a few years ago, he asked himself one question. “What could I do that would have the biggest effect on human health?” he wondered. “The answer was juice.”

That might sound like hyperbole when talking about Juicero, the first connected-kitchen countertop cold-press juicer. We are talking about liquid kale, after all. But because of the company’s goals, functionality, and business model, which Evans discussed at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle (watch the video below), it’s so much more. Here are three ways Juicero exemplifies a progressive mindset.

Make Something Useful

Unlike the big, bulky juicer that I have in my closet and never use, the Juicero is designed for people to use one to two times per day. It requires one touch to work and doesn’t need to be cleaned. Juicero provides ready-to-go packs of vegetables and fruit, delivered straight to your door.

“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?”

The company has set up an ecosystem that others can now use to maximize consumer health. “We have a cold supply chain, farm direct produce, IoT channel, appliances — You can use your imagination to think what else you can put through there that would make it easier for people to have other items that are made with fresh, ripe, raw, organic produce,” Evans said.

Connectivity Should Add Value

“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?” Richard Gunther of Universal Mind asked. These are essential questions in this wild west of connected-kitchen gadgets. In Juicero’s case, its app does everything from ordering automatically for enterprise accounts to telling home users that a pack in their refrigerator is about to expire. A scanner inside the juicer syncs with your app to tell you what you’re drinking, and if the pack is expired, the Juicero will not juice it. Talk about fresh.

Think Outside the Home

Evans is wisely following Keurig’s business model, focusing on restaurants, businesses, and other food service opportunities before moving to the end user market. The system only needs 10 square feet of space to work and doesn’t require someone to wash, peel, and juice produce as well as get rid of waste, making it an easy addition for restaurants and more.

Right now Juicero is only available in California and is available for purchase online. Watch the video to find out more!

Foodie Inventor Dave Arnold Is Making a Centrifuge

Dave Arnold wants to help you make the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted. The energetic, food-obsessed owner of experimental cocktail bar Booker & Dax and director of the Museum of Food & Drink has already created the Searzall torch attachment to help you, well, sear it all, and now he’s working on a centrifuge for home and restaurant use.

He uses the centrifuge at the bar to make his signature milk-washed spirits (think egg-white cocktails without the egg white), among other things, but practically speaking, a standard centrifuge is pretty impractical for anywhere but the lab. It costs about $8,000 and is “the size of a washing machine,” he said, and it doesn’t even allow you to make large quantities at a time.

Arnold’s centrifuge, on the other hand, is “designed for kitchens,” meaning that it operates at a lower rate (think 2,000 times the force of gravity instead of 4,000) and is much safer, smaller, lighter, and less expensive. He actually designed the centrifuge himself, quite a technical feat, and is micromanaging the manufacturers in China and the States to make sure they get every detail right.

He’s hoping to start discounted presales on Amazon Prime by the end of 2016 for less than $1,000.

That means restaurants will be able to afford to run four at a time, automatically increasing their ability to innovate and experiment.

What the heck would they be innovating and experimenting with? Well, clarifying any liquid you could ever want, for starters, especially fruit juices or even coffee. But where the centrifuge really “blows everything else out of the water” is with flavored and infused oils. “I don’t anticipate there being any other tool on the market that will touch it,” Arnold said. “Throw [the spices] in a centrifuge and the flavor is just like, ‘Sploooosh!’” Same for other recipes that don’t yield high amounts, like the famous pea butter from Modernist Cuisine, which he said is better made at home for a small family than in a restaurant with lots of hungry patrons.

Now, this isn’t going to change home cooking forever: Few people can afford a $1,000 gadget that makes flavored oil. And only the highest-end kitchens will probably consider using it. But those who do use it will find their food improved with little effort, which I personally hope will translate to higher standards for all food going forward.

Of course, Arnold acknowledges that there might be a little (read: giant) learning curve. “The way I tend to think about things isn’t the way most users think about things,” he said. “I’m not thinking about the recipe, I’m thinking about what’s happening inside the machine.” So he’s completely rewriting the protocols of how to use this thing (which he originally outlined in Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail).

“The problem is that people are going to go off the reservation, and it’s not going to fail in a predictable way,” he said. In other words, follow his directions. Or else suffer the wrath of a cloudy cocktail or imperfect curry oil. And no one wants that.

FabCafe Serves a Side of 3D Printing With Your Coffee

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Sure, you can get a latte to go at Japanese café FabCafe, but you might be missing the point. The innovative café from digital production company Loftwork takes 3D printing and robotics to the next level, with elaborate projects and workshops that allow its customers to experiment for themselves and create unique gifts and takeaways. The mini chain has just opened its seventh location, in Singapore, with other outposts in Japan, Taiwan, Spain, Thailand, and France. This year it plans to open yet two more locations, one in Europe and another in Asia.

Here are a few of its most amazing adventures.

Your Head, in Chocolate

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In 2013 FabCafe hosted a workshop with partner KS Design Lab that allowed its patrons the chance to get a full body 3D scan, 3D-print a mold of their head using a ProjetHD printer, fill it with chocolate, and plant the resulting edible treat in a box of bonbons for Valentine’s Day.

Another idea? Customized 3D-printed gummy selfies! Unlike the lame ones at Dylan’s Candy Bar, these are actually 3D and totally look like you.

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You can still make a customized bust of your head in plastic, not chocolate (sorry), at the café: It only takes about three hours.

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Also make personalized stamps, puzzles, tote bags, and more.

Robots Make the Best Coffee

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As part of a recent exhibit hosted at FabCafe in Japan, Bubble Lab showcased its robot arm coffee maker, which would make you a delicious single-origin coffee pour over.

Play With Your Food

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3D-print a special message on a macaron or a piece of white bread. It only takes about 30 minutes for the cookie and 15 for the bread, plus the time you’ll need to fiddle with your design on the iPad. Mine would say, “Chocolate chip cookies are better than macarons.”

We’ve seen the beginnings of this trend in the U.S. with 3D-printed latte art at places like Milk Street Cafe, in Boston, but it will only get more intense as 3D printing becomes easier. Here’s hoping we get a FabCafe in the States soon.

Why Whirlpool and GE Make “Sabbath Mode” Appliances

“Let there be light” might be an important part of the Old Testament, but for Orthodox Jews, it can be a burden on the Sabbath.

The traditional day of rest, which starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday, forbids any work, including turning on lights, ovens, blenders, whathaveyou. That’s why dozens of major appliance brands like KitchenAid, GE, LG, and Whirlpool consult with Jonah Ottensoser at kosher-certification company Star-K to offer appliances with something called “Sabbath Mode.”

The Sabbath Mode

The short version? The Sabbath mode keeps lights off in your refrigerator, automatically ends timers, and so on, so Orthodox Jews don’t have to interact with their appliances.

The long version? Well, in 1997 Whirlpool reached out to Star-K to help the company make Sabbath-compliant ovens. Whirlpool actually patented its Sabbath Mode in 1988, and over time other companies have followed suit, developing software and even special models specifically for this small subset of people (Ottensoser estimates about 100,000 families in the United States).

Here are a few of the specifications:

Ovens

Regular ovens shut off automatically after 12 hours; Sabbath-compliant ones keep on heating, so people can cook throughout the day. According to Star-K, “no lights, digits, solenoids, fans, icons, tones or displays will be activated/modified in the normal operation of the oven.” There’s even a built-in delay “between the request for temperature change and its actual implementation,” so you can’t ever be accused of working to change the temperature. Many also have a “timed bake” option, where the timer shuts off after a certain time rather than requiring you to turn it off.

Refrigerators

Lights, digits, icons, tones, alarms, and fans won’t be activated or deactivated when you open or close a refrigerator door in Sabbath mode. Ice and coldwater systems are also turned off, “since they invariably use electrical solenoids and motors to operate.”

A former engineer, Ottensoser works closely with major companies on these alterations, and he has thousands of Orthodox testers double-checking his work.

Why Companies Play Along

These models aren’t only sold to the Orthodox Jewish community; you can find them at Jewish-focused stores in Brooklyn as well as Sears in Iowa. “That’s the beauty,” said Ottensoser. “They program it into their model universally.”

Yet clearly these companies are spending a significant amount of time and energy pleasing a small group of consumers. Foodtech expert Brian Frank says there’s a reason for that: Appliance companies “want to build products that don’t exclude people, because that means they exclude a market opportunity or some innovation.”

He sees Sabbath Mode as a perfect example of the power of the connected kitchen. One piece of hardware can be programmed a variety of different ways to appeal to different groups of people. In the future, you’ll be able to upgrade your software or even download certain programs in order to expand and change the capabilities on your oven or refrigerator (like we all do with our smartphones, tablets, and computers). So instead of buying oven model GBS309P from Whirlpool as your only Sabbath-Mode option, you’d simply be able to download an app for timed bake, for example.

Frank believes we’ll even have commercial and consumer software options, where the same oven or microwave or refrigerator hardware is used in both environments, simply with different software, thus closing up a longstanding divide in the kitchen world.

In other words, this kind of technology gives “let there be light” a whole different meaning.

Eat My Face: I Made a 3D-Printed Candy Selfie at Dylan’s Candy Bar

This series explores the world of 3D printing through the most navel-gazing image possible: the selfie.

I thought it was going to be three-dimensional. I guess technically the gummy candy squirting out of the printer at Dylan’s Candy Bar on the Upper East Side was raised, but I’d imagined a Haribo-like gummy version of my face (like those gummy bears or frogs, or even Coke bottles), with a raised bump for a nose and lots of texture to stand in for my curly hair. This was more like lots of random squiggles painted on a flat card, with lots of white space in between.

Of course, the Beyoncé print was pretty awesome, squiggles and white lines be damned.

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After all, it’s made of candy, and everyone loves candy! Think somewhere between fruit leather and a fruit rollup, all vegan, all-natural, gluten-free, and gelatin-free, of course.

Called the Magic Candy Factory, the machine, which is made by Katje’s and looks like a MakerBot FDM/FFF printer, is pretty easy to use and pretty cool to watch.

Dylan's Candy Bar and Magic Candy Factory

After you pick your design from a tablet (either a shape already in the system or a photo that you upload), a trained Dylan’s employee does some sort of magic on the tablet (thickening lines on the image, adjusting contrast), inserts a syringe of warmed gummy candy (your choice of flavor!) into the printer, and lets it get to work. The employee decides how many layers the image needs: My elephant needed many, but my selfie only needed one. Then they manually clean up the lines with a long toothpick-looking thing and spray magic glitter, sour dust, or fuzzy dust on top. (Carlos, the Dylan’s Candy Bar staffer helping me, aka the best person ever, said he likes to wear the glitter in his hair and go for a run because it makes him feel like a unicorn.)

Each print costs $15, which might seem steep until you consider that Carlos (or another employee) spends about 30 minutes with each person, walking them through the process, taste-testing magnificent mango versus elegant elderberry, and generally explaining how the machine works. Rendering for a new print takes about 15 minutes but only 3 to 5 minutes to actually print.

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So what’s the most popular shape? Carlos likes the elephant, and he says that most kids choose animals or other 3D shapes. The adults, though? Selfies, all the way. Damn. I guess I really am an adult.

Pour Some Coffee (Ink) On It: The Realities of 3D-Printing Latte Art

Beth Epstein knew she needed to do something to make her café, Milk Street Café, hip. It’s in the middle of downtown Boston, the city’s “new center of technology,” she said, with a leading advertising company across the street and millennials everywhere. So starting in late July 2016, she installed a 3D latte-art printer called the Ripple Maker, which retails for $1,000 with service plans around $80 per month. “Customers love the idea,” she said, noting that she’s hoping people will start flocking to her space to get custom-printed images. They’re free of charge and make your latte 100 percent personalized.

It’s pretty easy for customers to use: Simply download the Ripple mobile app and pick a design or upload your own. The app will show you all the places nearby where you can print that image onto your latte: In Boston, Milk Street Café is the only one. Choose the café, get a number, and tell the barista when you arrive. The barista makes your cup of joe, then puts it into the machine, pushes a button, and 20 seconds later you get a gorgeous piece of artwork. Think everything from the Mona Lisa to Harry Potter to a company logo.

For the café, it’s a bit more complicated. Epstein said they had to install an entirely separate Wi-Fi network in order to sidestep security issues related to their credit card processing, which, along with all the accompanying issues, took some time. They’ve also had to train baristas on how to use the machine as well as customers coming in to use it. She said when it’s busy, they run demonstrations every 20 minutes to keep things moving. They’re working on custom illustrations and Boston-related sayings like “wicked smart” to customize the experience even more.

So are they making money or even breaking even? Not yet. “We’ve only been doing it for a few weeks, and we’ve been practicing a lot,” Epstein said. She’s hoping people will buy a pastry or something else to offset the cost, or come back with friends next time.

But that’s not the only issue.

In the coffee world, some subscribe to the free-pour latte school of art while others prefer “etching” (the first and second videos below, respectively).

FreePourLatteArt2

How to free-pour a rosetta, from Serious Eats

 

How to Etch a Bear | Latte Art

The Ripple Maker is an extreme example of etching, as it uses coffee extract as its ink.”And coffee experts like Matt Banbury at Counter Culture, one of the country’s best coffee roasters, believe it affects the taste of your drink negatively. Etching, he said, “is purely aesthetic. Rarely, if ever, is the product a great flavor experience.” And as far as coffee ink goes, he said, “I can’t imagine liking the flavor of a coffee extract any more than I prefer vanilla extract to real vanilla bean.” In other words, Milk Street’s high-quality coffee from Intelligentsia might be compromised by the 3D printer’s ink.

But at the end of the day, even if the coffee doesn’t taste 100% amazing, it’s pretty dang cool to get your selfie printed on your latte or play a practical joke on a co-worker with foam. As Epstein said, “It’s not going to save anyone’s life, but it’s going to make someone’s day.”