Make way for pastry artists.
In the near future, 3D printers will take care of the heavy work as they already do to build walls or produce small parts in series.
"The machines will save craftsmen time on the non-value-added part of the cakes such as the pie shells or the biscuit", predicts Marine Coré-Baillais, the boss of the young shoot La Pâtisserie Numérique.
"It will free their imagination for more complex and original cakes", assures this entrepreneur who has merged her two passions: baking and 3D printing.
Exhibited at the VivaTech show, the Patiss 3 printer looks like a big 14 kg oven and can produce up to 300 pie bases per day.
It is aimed at professionals such as bakers and caterers who can insert their own cake batter recipe or use cocoa powder and another tasteless powder.
The machine will then deposit this material, as it does with spools of plastic filament, layer by layer until a fillable pastry is obtained.
The printer lays down layers of paste with his head and follows the shapes of the mould.
Cake printing is nothing new and several industrial machines are already on the market.
"But the printed cakes were not until now not tasty because they needed additives and sugar for the shape to hold," explains this former manager of the start-up Sculpteo specializing in 3D printing.
Pastry chefs can choose the shape of their biscuit or their pie shell.
A natural cookie dough
Visitors are therefore invited to taste the difference on a piece of pastry with a confusing design at first sight.
Printed and cooked upstream for sanitary reasons in a workshop in Normandy, the batch of the day has retained its freshness and is easily devoured.
Only a few streaks remind us that the whole was built layer by layer by a machine.
The biscuit offers the taste buds a chocolate taste that the passion fruit filling brings out well.
The heart consists of a more intense chocolate biscuit.
The layers added by the food printer are discreet.
No real clearly noticeable difference with a cookie dough from a neighborhood pastry shop.
In short, we totally forget the mode of production and that a machine has replaced a kitchen clerk who could devote himself to less daunting tasks.
The general public will be able to form their own opinion this Saturday by visiting the stand of the Normandy region.
