IEEE Spectrum June, 2013 - 81

making it

Th e Fre n ch Tech n i q u e sou s vi d e (slow, low-temperature

cooking under vacuum) now has some competition. engineers at
Wageningen university & research Centre, working with the Dutch
companies oMVe and iXl netherlands, have devised a new cooking method they call nutri-pulse, which is said to rival sous vide for
preserving nutrients but works much faster.
how much faster? even the toughest cut of beef would take minutes instead of hours. is that fast enough for you?
nutri-pulse cooks by applying pulsed electric fields of 1000 to
4000 volts per centimeter, which cause tiny holes to form in the cell
membranes of the item being cooked. so things are made edible
and pathogens are killed, as in conventional cooking, but with only
a mild rise in temperature. the cooking occurs rapidly and without a
loss of nutrients or the formation of unhealthy compounds. generating such intense fields requires closely spaced electrodes, however,
which limits the size of the portion you can prepare this way. "it's not
a system where you can put in a few kilograms," says hans roelofs,
innovation director for iXl.
Various sectors of the food-processing industry have been using
pulsed electric fields for decades to sterilize milk and juice and to
better extract juice from some fruit and sugar from sugar beets.
What's new is the notion that the same technique can prepare foods
that appeal to the palate.
Whether nutri-pulse can really accomplish that is unclear. the
company is still testing its prototypes internally, and the cooks who
have been shown its capabilities are enthusiastic. "they were really
astonished," says roelofs. "they want to have it." but consulting engineer and institute of food technology fellow J. peter Clark, writing
about this technique in Food Technology magazine, gave the new
form of superfast cooking only faint praise: "raw foods are made
edible, but acceptance may require some adjustment to familiar expectations." that doesn't sound so yummy, does it?
someday soon, these Dutch engineers may perfect a system that
averts overcooking and maintains juiciness without taking as much
time as sous vide. for some foods that'll be great; for others it will no
doubt be awful. so hang on to that grill of yours. -DaViD sChneiDer

A food compositor would begin with a digital "recipe" in
which each ingredient has been broken down into tiny edible
elements-let's call them "morxels." To "print" a food, the compositor would mix and match morxels from a number of cartridges, each containing a basic building block for flavor or
texture. As the food compositor prints each morxel, it could
also season, dye, hydrate, and cook it with a heated element
or the zap of a laser. As with prototypes created by 3-D printers,
the shapes of composited dishes could be fancifully complex.
And as with inkjet photos, the color of the food could span the
hues of the rainbow.
To be sure, printing a meal won't be quite as straightforward
as printing a photo or an auto part. Flavor scientists have identified five basic categories of tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and
umami (meatiness or savory). But you can't simply re-create a
flavor by combining essences of these taste dimensions. Rather,

the early generations of food compositors will rely on a basic set
of carbohydrate and protein cartridges, plus some dried and powdered flavors. That might be all you need to reproduce a wide
range of Italian dishes, which draw from a relatively limited palette of ingredients, such as olive oil, garlic, basil, oregano, and
Parmesan cheese. If you wanted to print Thai food, you'd add to
your compositor flavors like chili peppers, lemongrass, fish sauce,
and galangal (similar to ginger). Those with broader tastes and
deeper pockets might stock a cartridge for every flavor found in
a restaurant or home kitchen-but there's probably no more than
a couple of hundred flavors.
Will food compositors take the creativity out of cooking?
They will certainly change it. The technology will remove
much of the uncertainty from the assembly of the food. And
so the creative part of cooking will move upstream-to inventing new recipes. Recipe development will take on new meaning when chefs have software-design tools for food-like, say,
a "ChefCAD" suite. New types of food that only a compositor
could make will be all the rage. Imagine an ornate edible chandelier constructed as fractals of deep-fried blooming onion, or
Bézier-curved brownies loaded with explosive bursts of hot
salted caramel and laced with fissures of frozen cream. The
possibilities are quite literally endless.

c o n v e n i e n t ? c e r ta i n ly. e n t e r ta i n i n g ? f o r s u r e . B u t a p r i n t e d
meal could also help you stay healthy. For instance, your compositor could avoid ingredients to which you are allergic or
intolerant. Prescription drugs and vitamins could be sold in
cartridge form and mixed into your meals. If you need to cut
your sodium intake, the machine could reduce the salt content of your food gradually over days and weeks, so that you
never even notice.
Having a huge variety of tasty foods at your fingertips might
seem like an invitation to overeat. On the other hand, losing weight
ought to be easier when you don't have to guess at a food's calorie content and can have your compositor replace high-calorie
fats and simple sugars with healthy proteins and complex carbohydrates. Here again, a compositor can help you make changes
slowly so that your taste buds have time to adjust.
But is this food going to taste good? Early generations of the
technology will probably do much better at replicating energy
bars than strawberries. Food-printing technology today is where
desktop printing was in the early 1980s, at the dot-matrix stage.
But as recently as 20 years ago, people still argued that digital
cameras would never replace film because they couldn't match
the resolution. So it's conceivable that 20 to 30 years from now,
we'll be printing strawberries that taste as good as what we can
buy today-and paying less for them.
SPectrum.ieee.orG

north american

jun 2013

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2013