3D-printing food just got way fancier.
Star Trek’s food replicators look like a total snoozefest when put up against the latest developments in 3D-printed food. This summer, the NASA-funded 3D-printed pizza project spat out some proto-pies, and now an Australian chef has ratcheted it up about 12 notches with an elaborate French pastry known as the croquembouche.
If you want to try to make a croquembouche from scratch, you have to make a few dozen perfectly formed puffs, fill them with just the right amount of pastry cream, glue them together in a beautiful pyramid with caramel, and drizzle the entire towering structure with spun sugar that’s the perfect balance between melting and glop. Trust me when I say it’s a total pain in the ass. But it’s a popular showcase item for skilled pastry chefs and a favorite of French wedding receptions.
Australian MasterChef contestant Reynold Poernomo, who participated in the show’s seventh season at the age of 20, has a much better plan: just 3D-print the thing.
We don’t know much about how much trial and error it took for Poernomo to get the recipe dialed in—the video description simply says “a lot”—but it’s so mesmerizing to watch him work in the background while the machine extrudes the perfectly browned choux that we really don’t care.