Cookies, Baked The 3D Printer Way

June 2, 2026 by Jenny List 20 Comments

Imagine for a moment that the Cookie Monster is going to visit, but all the cookie baking utensils in your house have been mislaid. The horror! Fortunately [Startup Chuck] is here with a video showing the process of baking cookies in a 3D printer, and as an extra treat he’s using entirely 3D printed utensils too.

The utensils are comprehensive array of all you’d need for serious cookie production, even going as far as to print a mixing bowl and beater for a KitchenAid mixer. There are scoops aplenty, and something we’re particularly impressed with, a spatula with a TPU blade. We’re guessing that FDM prints might not be the best for cooking because all manner of food could get caught in those layer lines and go off, but let’s face it, this is a bit of fun rather than a forever cooking project. We like the AI generated spork for its near-flatness, reminding us of our AI-generated breakfast. Finally he even prints a cookie baking sheet using nylon filament.

An enclosed 3D printer makes a surprisingly effective low-temperature oven, with the heated bed as the element. It works, and makes recognizable cookies, though they’re not browned. As entertaining as this experiment may be, we can’t recommend following his example — at the very least, moisture and food ingredients in your printer probably aren’t conducive to good future printing.

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Know Your Food: Cheesemaking

June 1, 2026 by Jenny List 78 Comments

There’s a thing that people who grew up on farms all share: a connection with food production that isn’t some mystical rose-tinted woo from a TV chef, but instead a practical general knowledge from being there on the ground. A glance at a crop in a field and you immediately recognise what it is, if it’s ploughing time you’ll know the soil type, and there’s always either too little, or too much rain. For a given foodstuff you’ll know far too much about where it came from, because if your dad wasn’t involved in its production, the chances are someone he knew was. You take this for granted, after all doesn’t everyone have this general knowledge? Seemingly not.

Hackaday is not a cooking channel, but I know we’re all interested here in how things are made. Shouldn’t that also extend to what we eat? It’s fashionable to follow a back-to-nature line that all commercial foodstuffs are somehow over-processed junk, but without the requisite knowledge you’re flying blind there. To know both how common foodstuffs should be made, as well as how they are made industrially, should be an essential for everyone.

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Cooking With Plasma (Not Fire)

April 17, 2026 by Dave Rowntree 13 Comments

Cooking food with fire is arguably the technology that propelled humans to become the dominant species on Earth. It’s pretty straightforward to achieve, just requiring a fuel source, a supply of oxygen from the air, and a way to initiate the reaction; then it self-sustains. You wouldn’t think there’s much to improve, but what about cooking with plasma? [Jay] from the plasma channel is no stranger here, and he thinks that there may be something in this idea, certainly enough to actually build something.

Now, let’s be straight with you, this isn’t a new concept, and you can buy a plasma-based cooking appliance right now. But they are all AC-powered devices. What if you want to go camping? [Jay] attempts (and succeeds) in building a portable, rechargeable 600W plasma cooking device that can actually cook food, but it was not all plain sailing.

The existing off-the-shelf ZVS driver modules available were a bit weak and unreliable, and the required flyback coils were hard to find with the right specs, so he needed to get down to work building custom parts. First off, the coils. Custom formers were resin-printed and machine-wound with 4000 turns of fine wire, and then resin-sealed into the former. [Jay] takes care to explain that it is crucial to get all the air out of the windings, or else local flashover breakdown will occur and wreck the coil in a short time. We reckon the resulting coils look amazing in their own right!

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Comparing 12 VDC Air Fryers With Regular 240 VAC Ones

April 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

That boiling water is a contentious topic of discussion is clear, but what about hot air? When you take a 12 VDC, 280 Watt-rated air fryer and pit it against a bog-standard 240 VAC, 1400 Watt unit, which one would you want to use when you’re doing some camping or other exciting off-the-grid opportunities? Unlike with boiling water the physics aren’t as clear-cut here, so [Cahn] did some testing to figure out exactly what the efficiency numbers look like

Since air fryers rely on the transfer of thermal energy from the resistive heating element into the food, any thermal energy that’s not immediately transferred is effectively wasted. This, combined with the relatively low power rating and thus much higher time demand of the low-voltage air fryer is enough to set one’s expectations pretty low.

As scientific test samples chicken nuggets were used with the test, following a preheating period for the 12 VDC unit. Both units managed to hit a safe temperature inside the nuggets after 20 minutes, thus successfully staving off food poisoning, but the browning with the 240 VAC air fryer was much better.

As for the efficiency, the 12 VDC unit required 150 Wh for 20 minutes plus the 10 minutes of preheating, with 45 minutes total at 225 Watt to get proper browning. Meanwhile the 240 VAC unit burned through 250 Wh in 20 minutes, with no pre-heating, though only 230 Wh with no inverter losses included. As a final test, the 12 VDC unit was run at 400 Watt using 14.6 VDC input, which did indeed get it up to temperature much faster.

Thus both are equivalent, just with the caveat that the low-voltage unit will take considerably more time to get the same result. This mirrors the results with boiling water, where most options mostly vary in how much time they require to get water up to a boiling temperature.

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Improving Soda By Turning It Into Mead

March 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

Test tasting soda mead. (Credit: Golden Hive Mead, YouTube)

You can certainly just chug down that bottle of soda you purchased, but if you accept the premise that the preparation of food and drink is just a subset of chemistry, and that chemistry is fun, then it naturally follows that using soda as the basis for brewing up some mead makes perfect sense. Thus the [Golden Hive Mead] blokes over on YouTube decided to create some Coca Cola flavored mead.

Mead is essentially just water mixed with honey that is left to ferment after adding yeast, resulting in what is also called ‘honey wine’, with an ethanol content of usually between 3.5% and 20%. Since soda is mostly water and comes with its own supply of sugar for yeast to feast on, this isn’t such a crazy choice in that respect. Just make sure to remove the carbonation, as the CO₂ makes the soda too acidic for the yeast to be happy.

Instead of straight honey, caramelized honey was used for extra flavor after which the brew was left to ferment for a while. For extra flavor notes aged oak, vanilla and cinnamon were added as well, to ensure that the fermentation didn’t erase those core notes of the coke. The result was apparently rather flavorful, with about a 10.5% ethanol content, receiving the full approval of both tame test tasters.

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Comparing The Power Usage Of 12 VDC And 240 VAC Kettles

March 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 40 Comments

If you have a 12 VDC power system, like the battery of a PV solar system or car, would it be more efficient to boil water for that cup of tea with that 12V straight from the battery, or use a 240 VAC mains kettle via a ~90% efficient inverter instead? That’s the question that [Cahn] decided to answer experimentally, using a bulky 3 kW inverter and a collection of electric kettles.

Although the used amount of 500 mL of water is boiled much faster in the 2,200 Watt mains kettle than in the 150 and 350 Watt low-voltage kettles, this obvious difference is somewhat irrelevant if you’re only concerned with efficiency. To measure the power used a Victron smart shunt was used with each run, keeping in mind that a perfect efficiency for heating 500 mL from room temperature to boiling is around 43-44 Wh.

With two runs per kettle, the 240 VAC kettle used 65-70 Wh. The first ‘150 Watt’ kettle pulled nearly 200 Watt to boil the water after about 20 minutes, using 62-64 Wh. The second ‘150 Watt’ kettle pulled around 180 Watt, took 23-25 minutes and used 68-74 Wh. Finally, the ‘350 Watt’ kettle drew over 420 Watt and used 50-56 Wh in just over 8 minutes.

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Making A Better Kitchen Scale Out Of Junk Parts

March 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Kitchen scales are plentiful and cheap, but their accuracy and measuring speed often leave a lot to be desired. In particular the filtering out of noise can make small changes a nightmare because adding a little bit of weight slowly can result in the result never updating. This frustrated [Mark Furneaux] enough that he dug up the load cell and metal base of a scrapped laboratory scale and added a strain gauge amplifier to build a better kitchen scale around it.

The only purpose-bought part was an HX710-based strain gauge amplifier module for $7 with LED display, with the metal base getting some metal bits welded onto it to hold said module as well as a push button and toggle switch. Existing wiring from the load cell was wired into the HX710 module, with power provided from a single 18650 Li-ion cell. This was paired with the standard TP4056-based module and its protection IC.

Ultimately the entire assembly looks very much bodged together, with plentiful zip ties, hot glue and messy welding, but it’s hard to deny that it seems to work well. A plastic cutting board makes for a good surface for the items being weighed, and measured drift across the range was about 200 mg, while the amplifier module updates the output in real-time so that you can see even the smallest changes and noise.

Even if you’re not lucky enough to have such a nice load cell and base kicking around, strain gauges are everywhere, and you can absolutely hack an existing (kitchen) scale to be better with some custom hard- and software.

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