JOIN USRobo-Chef
Waiting for the right moment to reach for the next ingredient, Moley Robotics’s robo-chef moves its arms as if in a shrug. It’s a peculiarly human gesture — but according to its creator, Mark Oleynik, therein lies its appeal. Who’d want an impersonal mechanical box whipping up your dinner when you can have a lifelike — albeit torso-less — android instead?
Incorporating two enormous arms and a pair of surprisingly nimble hands, the uncannily anthropomorphic actions are choreographed from movements caught by motion-capture technology as 2011 MasterChef winner Tim Anderson knocked up a crab bisque, wearing sensor-clad gloves. The result is mesmerising — enormous limbs deftly drop ingredients into the pan and gently stir them, considerately plonking used items in an adjacent sink. And the bisque that’s served up isn’t bad either — which is just as well since it is currently the only option on the menu.
For Oleynik, the vision is to produce a hi-tech solution to an everyday domestic challenge. With the tap of an app, he reveals, the evening meal can be chosen and the timing set, allowing the robotic kitchen to have dinner on the go by the time you get home. The commercial version is set to debut in 2018 for around $75,000 (£49,000), featuring an expanded repertoire of meals that owners can add to and a greater range of functions — at the moment human chefs need to prepare the ingredients, putting them in just the right place for the mechanical hands to grab. But will it find a place in our homes? Oleynik believes so.
Having recently taken to the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Shanghai, Moley Robotics’s kitchen is hot stuff, but it’s not the only machine donning an apron. IBM’s big-brained computer, Watson, is being harnessed by chefs to churn out new recipes, while San Francisco company Momentum Machines has created a robot capable of making burgers, cooking them and preparing toppings before popping the final product in a bag.
3D-printed food
“We think that within 10 to 15 years, 3D food printers will be a standard kitchen appliance, like the microwave,” says Lynette Kucsma, co-founder of Natural Machines, the Barcelona company that produces the Foodini, a cutting-edge 3D food printer.
This is clearly early stage technology, but watching the Foodini produce a perfect hexagonal wall of mashed potato in the kitchen of the Michelin-starred restaurant where it is being trialled shows its potential, certainly when it comes to food presentation. The machine looks like a large microwave and inside are a set of capsules for the ingredients. In this case, you put mashed potato in one capsule, choose a nozzle size and a design and press go. Within two minutes, out comes mashed potato, exactly as you put it in, but in an interesting shape.
The machine is getting attention from top restaurant chefs who are always looking for creative and original ways of presenting food. “Anything that requires shaping or layering, from simple bread sticks to more complex ravioli, that’s where 3D food printing comes into play,” Kucsma says. “There are also designs the machine can produce that, no matter how steady your hand, you couldn’t do yourself.”
At $1,500 (£975), when it begins to ship early next year, it may be some time before the Foodini becomes the must-have appliance.“The idea of a 3D printer conjures up images of processed food, but that’s not what this is about,” Kucsma says. “It’s all about fresh ingredients, these are your recipes, you don’t have to change anything. We’re never going to force people to buy prepared food capsules or add chemicals, like with other printers. It’s all about real food.”
One of the Foodini’s selling points is it can make a filled ravioli in two minutes, not bad for what is a fussy operation when done by hand. What makes the Foodini different is it produces a range of sweet and savoury foods with multiple ingredients.
Kucsma says that she and her business partner, Emilio Sepúlveda, are getting a lot of interest from chefs, hotels and caterers in China and the US. They also responded to Nasa’s interest in 3D food printing by producing a 3D pizza in five minutes. “It’s possible that the Foodini will be in space,” Kucsma says. “There are challenges, like no gravity, and there are issues about weight and micro-organisms. It’s not our number one priority but it’s an interesting market.”
Smart Oven
I am watching food porn on an iPhone in the office of a San Francisco startup — a birds-eye view of baking chocolate chip cookies gently rising. “You wouldn’t get that experience with a traditional oven,” says Nikhil Bhogal proudly. He is the co-founder and CTO of June, a modern appliance company, that recently unveiled its $1,495 (£972) smart oven of the same name for pre-order. It will begin shipping in spring 2016. The oven, which includes an internal camera in its roof, does more than promise a new era of food voyeurism. The prototype we are watching knew when the cookies had been placed inside and also how to bake them to perfection (14 minutes at 325F was its recommendation).
When done, it will turn itself off and alert the iPhone app through which the oven’s basic functions can be remotely controlled. “This is going to go down in history as the first kitchen appliance which was artificially intelligent,” says Bhogal, claiming he doesn’t believe kitchens have seen as big a transformation since the invention of the microwave.
The oven’s software was taught using algorithms to recognise different foods, by being shown example images again and again. It knew what chocolate chip cookie dough was because it has seen close to 1,000 samples and learned the common features.
Once the oven has recognised a food it uses a cooking program based on experiments conducted by June’s resident chef. Because the same food can come in different shapes, sizes and densities, as well as start out at different temperatures, a built-in oven scale weighs items and the camera allows for counting.
There are also temperature probes, designed to be inserted into foods such as meat, fish, pies and bread loaves to ensure thorough cooking or a preferred level of “doneness”. So far the oven recognises 26 foods from steak to chocolate cake, but June is working to increase this, says Bhogal. Will it become a mainstay of future kitchens? There is a cultural shift underway where people want to be more connected with their food and experiment in the kitchen, believes Bhogal.
“This is going to be the technology which helps this [tech savvy] generation rediscover the joy of cooking,” he says. At least, that is, if they’re willing to follow what the oven knows.
More cooking gadgetsbettermicrowave.com
A heat-map microwave that uses infra-red cameras to capture and display the temperature of your food on an LCD screen, helping you know when it has been heated up.
Intelligent pans
Pans like SmartPromptPan use sensors to detect and alert you if your food is burning or boiling.
Situ
For the health-conscious, these kitchen scales weigh your food and link to an iPad app that offers nutritional information.
Maid oven
This smart microwave reads stored recipes out loud, and makes personalised recommendations on what you should cook by learning your nutritional requirements.
(With additional inputs from Stephen Burgen and Zoë Corbyn)
The Observer Tech Monthly