Food In Brief: 3D Printers, Nutella Cronut Holes, and GoT Beer

From 3D Food Printers to Nutella Cronut Holes to Magic Taiwanese Mushrooms to Game of Thrones beer, Kitchenette has you covered with Food in Brief.

Ommegang Brewery in New York has just announced its fourth Game of Thrones-themed beer: “Valar Morghulis,” and if you can think of a more awesome name for a beer than that, shut up, no you can’t.

Apparently, Ommegang has been doing this for a while: the first three it released were Iron Throne Blonde Ale, Take the Black Stout, and Fire and Blood Red Ale. Valar Morghulis, meanwhile, is a Belgian Dubbel with sweet fruit notes and a slightly-bitter aftertaste, and that combination of flavor descriptions is so perfect for a beer called Valar Morghulis that I want to buy all of it, ever.

The Taiwanese Food and Drug Administration has had to ask the country’s citizens to please not randomly eat wild, unidentified mushrooms. Seriously, they actually had to put out a press release on this.

This comes in response to a recent incident where a man mistakenly ate psilocybin mushrooms that he found growing in the wild, then spent the next two hours hallucinating (as tends to happen on shrooms). The man was in Yangmingshan, Taipei to take wedding photographs with his fiancee when he noticed a number of white mushrooms “growing on cow dung.” So, of COURSE he picked them, took them home, cooked them, and ate them. I mean, what else do you do with wild, unidentified poop mushrooms? You can’t let those things go to waste.

In response to the FDA, every single person in Taiwan who isn’t an overgrown infant put out a statement saying “well, no shit.”

Pastry Mad Scientist Dominique Ansel, always looking to push the bounds of sugar science in new directions, has announced the creation of the Nutella Cronut Hole. The kicker is that Ansel is going to be handing out the 2,000 delectable cronut spheres for free on Monday from 10 AM to 2 PM at the Broadway Pedestrian Plaza between 23 and 24 street. If you live in New York and feel like braving the crowds that are going to spawn (because, again, Nutella cronut holes), enjoy your delicious dessert creation.

Given the tremendous amount of mockery Kitchenette has leveled at Ansel, it might surprise regular readers to know that we actually quite like the guy; he seems like a genuinely good dude who does his job because he really just likes doing it. It’s important to remember that mockery does not = hate.

Lastly, Fox News (ugh, I know, I know) has an article about the potential home and commercial uses of 3D printers in cooking. Surprisingly, the article does not refer to 3D Food Printers as “a Socialist plot by Nobama to infect all of your kitchen appliances with the Benghazi virus,” but I mean, they do use a Jetsons’ reference in the first paragraph when talking about “replicators” because Star Trek: The Original Series is way too newfangled for their core viewership, so there’s that.

It’s actually a surprisingly interesting read that explores the potential future use of 3D printers in food preparation. While the cost of 3D printers in general has gone down in recent years, 3D food printers are still not cheap — the three listed in that article range from $1,300 to $10,000. Thus, even though they are now available for home use, it’s unlikely you’ll start seeing them in anyone’s house outside of the niche market. Similarly, while restaurants are in a better position to afford them, they don’t currently work quite fast enough to be viable in a busy kitchen.

It would seem that while 3D food printers are a promising technology, they’re unlikely to take hold any time soon.