In the future, nobody will have to cook for themselves: the robots will take care of it all for us. And fast! At least if folks like [Avidan Ross] have their way. He gave a talk on his 45-second pizza robot, and other DIY food automations, at the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference, and you’re invited to pretend that you were there by watching this video.
Why would you want to build machines to build food? It’s a serious challenge, and there’s always going to be room to improve and new frontiers to cross. There’s immediate feedback: [Avidan] gets to taste and tweak in a quick feedback cycle. And finally, everybody eats, so it’s not hard to find “test subjects” for his work.
Super Hot, Super Fast Pizza
OK, so now you’re onboard with why you’d want to work on food, why would you want to cook your pizza so fast? The answer is the crust. When the oven is hot enough to vaporize water and cook the dough firm in nearly the same instant, it leaves big fluffy air pockets that make a phenomenal crust. Neapolitan pizza authorities require a pizza to be cooked in 90 seconds. [Avidan] was sure that hotter and faster would be better, so he aimed for a 45-second pizza.
The talk gets into the specifics of building a rocket stove, and a Pompeii oven on top of that. And while he got an oven that would reach 1000 degrees F, and cook a pizza in 60 seconds, that was only excessively fast and not ridiculously fast. So he added forced air and some smarts. Or rather, after firing it up for the first time, and losing some eyebrows to the ensuing 1500 degree F flamethrower, he throttled it down using an H-bridge and a microcontroller brain.
The oven is actually a hybrid: the floor of the oven is precisely controlled with Kanthal coil and a temperature probe for feedback, while the wood fire heats up the dome and adds smokey flavor. So when the pizzas were coming out a bit soft on the bottom, [Avidan] could crank up the floor temperature to compensate. In the end they got the temperatures so well controlled that they used a three-stage profile over the 45 seconds: super hot for the first ten seconds, medium hot in the middle, and then back to super hot for the last ten seconds to finish it off. Why? Because it tasted the best. It’s not science unless you can isolate the variables, folks.
Food Hacking
The second half of [Avidan]’s talk is more approachable for those of us who don’t have space for a 3000-lb, wood-devouring flamethrower in the back yard. It’s all about fun ways to introduce automation into your home kitchen. “Introduce” with a screwdriver, sensors, and a Raspberry Pi, that is.
If you want to get started making your own cooking automation, you want to approach it like an engineer. Knowing your food and the chemistry of your cooking techniques is obvious, but [Avidan]’s approach is to control and automate everything. So when he built a smoker, he controlled not just the temperature inside the smoker, but also the airflow going into the fire chamber, and even the humidity inside. Then he put sensors on everything and closed the loop. That way, he could create whatever temperature profile he wanted, and nail it.
And now, [Avidan] is working on coffee. There’s a scale on the floor of the espresso machine and a stepper motor on the grinder, controlling how finely the coffee is ground. So when he pulls a shot, the coffee machine knows how fast the espresso is coming out. Eventually, [Avidan] is going to close the loop, making the grinder run coarser when the espresso shot takes too long, and vice versa. With the right feedback, this should eventually make the perfect cup. (He doesn’t mention how he’s controlling the pressure with which the operator tamps down the grinds. Inquiring minds want to know!)
DIY
In the end, [Avidan]’s talk is really just about the joys of building your own. In his case, it’s his own food-making machines, but that’s just a detail really. He loves food, and we do too, but he could have just as easily have been talking about robot gardening or automated scarf weaving. The point is to pick something that you love and automate it to see if you can make it better. You’ll be more motivated along the way, and you’ll be that much more proud of the outcome. That’s great advice to the budding hardware hacker!
Zone controlled ovens running heat treat cycles for pizza – just the sort of technical overkill that makes a great hack.
I agree! Too much fun….and the output is too damn tasty.
What I think is this guy is a clown and has no idea of what he is talking about . Put down the microphone and stop talking. You have no idea of what you are trying to express . You are an idiot, please stop talking h.
“talk is really just about the joys of building your own” Same goes for food. Keep your robot away from my skillet.
i do have a design for a smart skillet. but ill spare you the details :)
I suddenly fell the urge to open up my toaster.
Why are the slides not visible in the video? Who did this? WHY? A little frame in the corner with the slides… pleeeeeaaase!
Here is a useful resource for the Food Engineering side of it, put up by the New Zealand Institute of Food Technologists (and of course the U.S. IFT won’t bother). A lot of good stuff here, in this instance the units on heat transfer.
http://www.nzifst.org.nz/unitoperations/links.htm
Why in the hell would you automate cooking or say gardening? People find both joyful(excluding geeks) and even social activities. Not everyone is a solitary geek.
That said, these robo-ovens will probably find a place at auto food kisoks serving tasteless, bland, unhealthy fast food to people who don’t care what they stuff down their gullet. Because that’s all they are good for.
You certainly will not see traditional Italian eateries junking their pizza ovens for this monstrosity. BTW their ovens get up 800 degrees and only take a minute or two to bake a pizza.
For me at least, the joy is in finding a way to automate a process and implementing that solution. Using the results of the automation gives a fulfilling feeling of satisfaction, but is a secondary concern.
But more importantly, why are you even here?
Seriously, you were presented with an awesome super-fast flamethrower pizza oven and your reactions were to:
1) Shout “stop automating cooking, you geeks!”
2) Baselessly claim it can’t make good pizza
The second point was addressed in the summary (3-stage closed-loop oven controls for maximally tasty pizza), and as for the first… if you own a microwave, you’re now a hypocrite.
haha. you should watch the video. this was no kiosk. i used a 90 year old italian sourdough starter ive been feeding for years, caputo 00 flour, fresh burrata and a hand crushed san marazano tomato sauce….in addition, the fuel source was almond wood, which is one of the best burning woods available….just cuz we added technology to spin the pizza automatically and air blowers to add heat, does not make this an automat!
How can I get the design for what you did? I would like to build one for my pizza shop. How did the pizza actually taste?
If it was Hawaiian pizza than it tasted horrible.
That’s probably exactly what ignorant asshats said when the first guy came around with an 800 degree oven.
No. But perhaps I am a geek? :-) I don’t like cooking, especially for me alone. Normally I reduce it to putting something into the microwave for 2:30. Or I call the local pizza place and tell them, that I want to fetch a pizza in 10 min – much faster than waiting for delivery (and you get a free Pepsi).
In the garden I much more enjoy building on the solar system or a roof/ 3-sided shed for the firewood than sticking my fingers into the earth.
And fast food is normally not tasteless on the contrary: sometimes they overdo it with the flavor enhancers.
But 800° for a pizza oven? that”s something of medium red incandescence, I do nat want to forge a pizza. The hottest I have seen was something between 400° and 500°C.
This is really about feeding people fast, not about tradition. If you don’t want a 30 second pizza, go to a 30 minute pizza place.
I couldn’t stand waiting that long.
I used to use an old casting kiln for heating up pizza… more than 30 seconds and it was burnt. Mind you it was over 1000 Degrees C in there! :-) And this was during it’s cool down cycle; it wasn’t even _on_ ;-) Quicker than a microwave, that’s for sure!
That’s really hot. But as much as I like to use the microwave, Pizza out of it is really bad, it’s not tasty.
so what?, nobody follows Alton Brown? I mean he is at 3 minutes, but there are stage safety concerns
that was great
Better to have a robot that makes food, than food that makes a robot.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the pizza came out plaid.
Very good presentation. Definitely recommend watching the video. There is more than just pizza cooking in there.
You can cook a pizza in similar speed using hot air impingement with a microwave system. Several commercial systems do this for various things, such as the toasting ovens at Subways.
Let’s not forget about Alton Brown’s Mega Bake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfdwoqNauzk
54kW and no power for a motor to move the pizza through :-) But what is the use of moving it so much? The density of the lights seems to be the same over the length of the oven.
At about 3:48 you can see the uniformity of the lighting.
I am hungry now.
So could this pizza oven double as an aluminum foundry?
Great example of looking into “if a lot is good, is even more better?” Not sure I quite like the look of the extremely charred mozerella, but it sounds like the rest of it is way better than what I’ve been able to pull off with my home oven.
Binge watching Gordon Ramsey <3