Bread Proofing Box For The Hungry Hacker

September 25, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 29 Comments

While normally more comfortable with a soldering iron, [LucidScience] recently took a dive into woodworking and hardware store electronics to build a DIY proofing box. It’s a clever design that doubles as furniture, with some cool problem-solving along the way. While it might not be your typical hack, repurposing seedling heat mats and working with insulation makes it a neat project for anyone who likes to tinker. Plus, the whole thing cranks out two loaves of sourdough bread each week!

The setup includes an 8 watt heat mat, typically used for aquariums or seedlings, and a temperature control box, so no complicated wiring is needed. The entire box is insulated with rigid foam, which makes it energy efficient—once the foam was installed, the heat mat only needed to turn on about a quarter of the time. To give it a more polished look, [LucidScience] hid the raw plywood edges with oak trim, and even added an adjustable vent for moisture control. Pretty slick for something built from basic materials and a few tools!

While this proofing box isn’t a groundbreaking electronics project, it shows how even simple hardware can be repurposed for entirely new applications. The combination of woodworking and basic electronics makes it an approachable project for DIYers looking to stretch their skills. Whether you’re into hacking, woodworking, or just love good bread, this build has something for everyone. [LucidScience]’s clear instructions and simple materials make this a great weekend project that can upgrade your baking game.

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Hack Makes Microwave Cookies Fast And Not Terrible

March 11, 2024 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Making a chocolate chip cookie is easy. Making a good chocolate chip cookie is a little harder. Making a good chocolate chip cookie quickly is a pretty tall order, but if you cobble together a microwave and a conventional oven, you just might get delicious and fast to get together.

The goal of this Frankenstein-esque project is to build a vending machine that can whip up a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie on demand and make [Chaz] wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. We’re guessing at that last part; for all we know his goal is world peace through instant cookies. We’re fine with the idea either way, and his previous work on the project resulted in a semi-automatic cookie gun to splooge the dough out in suitable dollops.

The current work is turning those into something edible, for which a microwave seems a logical choice. Experience tells us otherwise, so off to the thrift store went [Chaz], returning with a used air fryer. He ripped the guts out of a small microwave, slapped the magnetron onto the side of the air fryer, and discovered that this was officially A Bad Idea™ via a microwave leakage tester. Round 2 went the other way — adding a conventional heating element to a large microwave. That worked much better, especially after close-up video revealed the dynamics of microwave cookery and the best way to combine the two cooking modalities. The result is a contraption that makes a pretty tasty-looking two-minute cookie. World peace, here we come!

Of course there’s plenty to say about the safety of all this, much of which [Chaz] himself cops to in the video. It’s important to remember that he’s just prototyping here; we’re sure the final machine will be a little more sophisticated than a heat gun duct-taped to the side of a microwave. Those cookies aren’t going to bake themselves, though, so you’ve got to start somewhere.

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Who Needs Yeast When You Have Lab Equipment?

March 26, 2022 by Donald Papp 32 Comments

This particular story on researchers successfully making yeast-free pizza dough has been making the rounds. As usual with stories written from a scientific angle, it’s worth digging into the details for some interesting bits. We took a look at the actual research paper and there are a few curious details worth sharing. Turns out that this isn’t the first method for yeast-free baking that has been developed, but it is the first method to combine leavening and baking together for a result on par with traditional bread-making processes.

Some different results from varying the amount of pressure released during the baking process.

Basically, a dough consisting of water, flour, and salt go into a hot autoclave (the header image shows a piece of dough as seen through the viewing window.) The autoclave pressurizes, forcing gasses into the dough in a process similar to carbonating beverages. Pressure is then released in a controlled fashion while the dough bakes and solidifies, and careful tuning of this process is what controls how the bread turns out.

With the right heat and pressure curve, researchers created a pizza whose crust was not only pleasing and tasty, but with a quality comparable to traditional methods.

How this idea came about is interesting in itself. One of the researchers developed a new method for thermosetting polyurethane, and realized that bread and polyurethane have something in common: they both require a foaming (proofing in the case of bread) and curing (baking in the case of bread) process. Performing the two processes concurrently with the correct balance yields the best product: optimized thermal insulation in the case of polyurethane, and a tasty and texturally-pleasing result in the case of pizza dough. After that, it was just a matter of experimentation to find the right balance.

The pressures (up to 6 bar) and temperatures (145° Celsius) involved are even pretty mild, relatively speaking, which could bode well for home-based pizza experimenters.

Portable Pizza Oven Has Temperature Level Over 900

January 24, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 36 Comments

While it’s possible to make pizza from scratch at home right down to the dough itself, it’ll be a struggle to replicate the taste and exquisite mouthfeel without a pizza oven. Pizzas cook best at temperatures well over the 260°C/500°F limit on most household ovens while pizza ovens can typically get much hotter than that. Most of us won’t have the resources to put a commercial grade wood-fired brick oven in our homes, but the next best thing is this portable pizza oven from [Andrew W].

The build starts with some sheet metal to form the outer and inner covers for the oven. [Andrew] has found with some testing that a curved shape seems to produce the best results, so the sheet metal goes through rollers to get its shape before being welded together. With the oven’s rough shape completed, he fabricates two different burners. One sits at the back of the oven with its own diffuser to keep the oven as hot as possible and the other sits underneath a cordierite stone to heat from the bottom. Both are fed gas from custom copper plumbing and when it fires up it reaches temperatures hot enough that it can cook a pizza in just a few minutes. With some foldable legs the oven also ends up being fairly portable, and its small size means that it can heat up faster than a conventional oven too.

This is [Andrew]’s third prototype oven, and it seems like he has the recipe perfected. In fact, we featured one of his previous versions almost two years ago and are excited to see the progress he’s made in this build. The only downside to having something like this would be the potential health implications of always being able to make delicious pizzas, but that is a risk we’d be willing to take.

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How To Bake Brownies With A Perfect Glossy Skin

February 14, 2021 by Lewin Day 35 Comments

If you’re anything at all like this writer, you don’t spend a lot of time inspecting brownies past the initial object identification phase, preferring to insert them directly into the mouth post-haste. But those with more of an aesthetic focus take great care to produce brownies with a glossy, attractive skin. [Adam Ragusea] decided to find out what it takes to get a perfect brownie skin, time after time.

After many, many trays of brownies, [Adam], with the assistance of [Dr. Pia Sörensen], determined that the key seems to be making a brownie mixture with very finely dissolved sugar, in sucrose form, with a carefully controlled amount of water in the mixture. This produces a thick mixture which can hold together against the gases bubbling out during the cooking process, and produces a nice glossy skin. Too much water, and the mixture isn’t viscous enough to hold up, leading to brownies full of pock marks, while alternative sugars like fructose and glucose likely disrupt the ordered structure of sucrose molecules necessary for a shiny surface.

Together, [Adam] and [Pia] do a great job of exploring the molecular chemistry behind the process, as well as ruling out several myths that have been perpetuated in the viciously insular brownie subculture. All they’re missing is a set of standardised reflectivity tests executed with an Arduino and some photodiodes, but we’ll assume that was just cut for time. We’ve seen other hacks in the realm of molecular gastronomy before, like this homebrew kitchen centrifuge. Video after the break.

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Cupcake Machine Makes Tasty, If Weird, Creations

December 31, 2020 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Baking cupcakes is a fun pastime, and one which we imagine many people took up in this year of quarantine and lockdown. However, anything a human can do, a machine can certainly make an attempt at, as [Skyentific] shows with this roboticized cupcake machine.

The build will be familiar to anyone who has worked with 3D printers or DIY CNC machines before. A series of stepper motors move a carriage carrying a regulation-sized patty pan. This is filled with dough from a tube, squirted out by a modified electric caulking gun. The carriage then transports it to a small microwave chamber of custom construction. After a minute or so of cooking, it’s then removed, and topping is applied from a further two caulking guns. An Arduino is in charge of the operation, running the show with some stepper drivers, limit switches, and a bank of relays.

The final product isn’t the prettiest cupcake we’ve ever seen, but it’s perfectly edible. We can imagine with some small modifications the device could probably cook batches of four at a time without too much trouble. We’ve seen other baking robots before, too. Video after the break.

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Beautiful Sourdough Bread At Home Thanks To Dynamic Recipe Parameterization

May 26, 2020 by Donald Papp 21 Comments

More people are making sourdough at home than ever before, and while it may not take a lot of effort to find a decent recipe, it’s quite another thing to try using recipes to figure out how and why bread actually works. Thankfully, [Makefast Workshop] has turned copious research and hundreds of trials into a dynamic sourdough (and semi-sourdough) bread recipe chock-full of of drop-down options to customize not just ingredients, but baking methods and other recipe elements as well. Want to adjust quantities or loaf styles? Play with hydration or flour type? It’s all right there, and they even have quick-set options for their personal favorites.

In order to do all this, [Makefast Workshop] needed to understand bread at a deeper level than is usually called for. During research, they observed that the format of recipes was often an obstacle to understanding how good bread actually gets made. The reason for this is simple: recipes are presented as standalone documents describing a fixed process; a set of specific steps that, when followed, yield a particular result. What they do not normally do is describe the interplay and balance between ingredients and processes, which makes it difficult to understand how and why exactly the recipe produces what it does. Without that knowledge, it’s impossible to know what elements can be adjusted, and how. The dynamic recipe changes all that.

[Makefast Workshop] performed hundreds of tests, dialing in parameters one by one, to gain the insights needed to populate their dynamic recipe. It’s got clear processes and drop-down options that dynamically update not just the recipe steps, but also the URL. This means that one can fiddle the recipe to one’s desire, then simply copy and paste the URL to keep track of what one has baked.

When it comes to thoughtful approaches to food, this certainly isn’t [Makefast Workshop]’s first rodeo. We covered their beautiful directions for creating delicious speculoos, complete with effective 3D printed molds for a modern twist on a Belgian classic.