... MORE CREATIVE
Kitchen creativity has few limits. From Weetabix ice cream to liquid nitrogen cocktail balls, exciting dishes are made by chefs who love to surprise, but few such culinary masterpieces make it into the home, owing to a reliance on specialist equipment and professional skills. Expect that to change as equipment becomes more affordable. Even today, the sous-vide water bath that was once reserved for fine dining restaurants can be purchased for less than a set of pans. In the coming years, the spiraliser will have been eclipsed by a handheld spherificator or foam-making espuma gun. For the ambitious home cook, getting creative is going to be a lot more fun.
When skills are lacking, a robotic sous-chef may lend a helping hand. Imagine being able to send a message your Robo-Chef while on the commute home to prepare a recipe of your choice. Within moments, android arms will be gathering ingredients from the fridge, julienning the turnips and deboning the chicken.
It’s not completely pie-in-the-sky, either. UK-based Moley Robotics has already developed a ‘robotic kitchen’, set for consumer release this year. Consisting of two articulated arms, cooking hobs, oven and touchscreen interface, this is a robot that can chop, whisk, stir, pour and clean. It’s no clumsy Dalek either: each hand has 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors to mimic the movements of human hands. Skills are ‘learnt’ by replicating the movements of chefs and other cooks, and their recipes can be selected via an iTunes-like recipe catalogue. The speed and dexterity of the robotic kitchen will have foodies salivating at the possibilities. But with the first devices expected to cost around £10,000 each, it might be worth holding out until they throw in a dishwasher.
Elsewhere, 3D-printed food offers endless opportunities for creating intricate dishes that are impossible to create by human hands alone. Everything from toys to airplane parts, from prosthetics to clothing – even whole houses – are already being made with 3D printers. And the food frontier has been crossed. Custom sweets can be designed and made using sugarrich ‘ink’ to construct anything from interlocking candy cubes and chewable animal shapes, to lollipops in the shape of Queen Elizabeth’s head.
Until recently, 3D printing has been sugar-based, but technology is emerging that reliably prints savoury and fresh ingredients. Natural Machines has developed one such kitchen appliance that can be loaded with multiple ingredient capsules to create and cook all manner of weird and wonderful foods. These include: crackers shaped like coral, hexagonal potato chips, heart-shaped pizzas and hollow croutons that dissolve in sauce. With the promise of cutting waste by repurposing ‘ugly’ food and offcuts for food capsules, Natural Machines has the potential to drastically reduce packaging and transport costs. Not yet sold on the idea? Imagine wowing your nearest and dearest by serving up the ultimate romantic meal finished off with a personalised chocolate torte, where an invisible series of grooves in the chocolate surface plays their favourite song when placed in a special ‘record player’. Delicious!
Dr Stuart Farrimond is a science and medical writer and educator. His new book, The Science Of Spice: Understand Flavour Connections And Revolutionize Your Cooking (£20, DK) is out in October.