Food printer - Anhely Yazmin

The printer allows you to create plates with the ingredients that are put into the 120 centimeters capsules and can work up to five different foods at a time.

The nutritionist Alex Vidal, professor of Health Sciences Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain), stresses that this new technology, besides using to print parts in the industrial sector, manufacture prostheses for medicine or make figures More than decoration, you are also entering the kitchen.

With this new tool you can design elements, volumes and textures to give a return to the different proposals and the dishes that great restorers make, says Vidal.

Several companies have become interested in 3D food printing. One is Máquinas Naturales, an emerging company based in Barcelona that sells Foodini, a machine that works with capsules and a great variety of foods, both sweet and salty.

Vidal regrets that, although it may be useful for certain groups of people, at the moment this technology "is not accessible for all" among other things for its price, "which in many cases exceeds 1,000 euros." For this reason, so far only have been introduced in the restoration and mainly in innovative establishments and of a certain level.

Most 3D food printers work similarly to a pastry bag: adding layers and layers of food and is often used with creamy and non-hard ingredients such as chocolate, cream cheese, pasta, ice cream, jam , Mustard, or peanut butter.

Vidal points out that it can not yet be printed with all sorts of ingredients. "This is a challenge that the industry still has, along with the introduction of cooking, since most of the machines do not cook and need to finish the dish in the oven, in the pan and in the pot," he said. To print a pizza or a cake, hay to test the raw material machine, program and wait until they prepare the dish, a process that can take only five minutes until the blackjack, depending on the recipe and difficulty. This type of devices are used successfully in Cafeteria.