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May 23, 2023
Danli Luo, a UW doctoral scholar learning human centered design and engineering, developed a toolkit of sensors and controllers that helped her re-create three dishes from rising up in China: spring roll wrappers (proven right here), tofu and rice wine.Luo et al./CHI 2023
Many folks bear in mind a particular meals they loved as kids, whether or not it’s a particular pie made by a grandparent, a once-a-year tasty deal with for a vacation or spring rolls from a avenue vendor. But whereas the reminiscence of the expertise is available, the recipe to make that meals shouldn’t be. Even with entry to recipes on-line or handed down by way of generations, it’s arduous to stability the difficult strategy of cooking with the sensory particulars from a reminiscence.
What if we may use know-how to take a few of the ache out of re-creating recipes? Maybe a thermometer to maintain tabs on the temperature or a stirrer to repeatedly combine components? That manner, a cook dinner may focus all of their consideration on the main points of their reminiscences: the style, the feel or the odor.
Danli Luo, a University of Washington doctoral scholar of human centered design and engineering, developed a toolkit of sensors and controllers that helped her re-create three dishes from rising up in China: rice wine, tofu and spring roll wrappers.
Luo presented this project April 25 on the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Daniela Rosner, UW affiliate professor of human centered design and engineering, and Nadya Peek, UW assistant professor of human centered design and engineering, are additionally co-authors on this paper.
UW News sat down with Luo to speak about this analysis.
Danli LuoUniversity of Washington
What impressed you to do that venture?
Danli Luo: It all began when my advisers and I have been brainstorming scents and spices. There’s a really particular spice, known as litsea oil, that I don’t assume is frequent in Western culinary custom and even in Asian culinary custom. It’s very particular to a area that my mother and father are from, hundreds of miles away from right here. So the inspiration for this venture was to develop a toolkit that might assist us re-create culturally significant dishes — all three of the dishes I made for this paper used completely different spices from my childhood. I needed to dig across the web quite a bit to seek out the litsea oil. And it’s nonetheless a bit completely different than what’s in my reminiscence.
Why do the meals need to be personally important to make use of this methodology?
DL: If you haven’t tried a dish ever, how will you re-create a private expertise from it? This toolkit works extra with one thing that you’ve eaten however by no means made earlier than — such an ancestor’s recipe — and also you simply can’t determine the method.
The toolkit helps us simplify that course of. And then we use our reminiscence to gauge the ultimate product. During the method of re-creating these dishes, we are able to extract the enjoyment and the connection to our household and family members.
How does your toolkit examine to different “precision cooking” methods, comparable to an Instant Pot or a bread maker?
DL: Instant Pot is a good device, nevertheless it automates every part. If one thing goes flawed, you gained’t perceive what occurred. You simply need to do it once more, and you continue to don’t know why or how issues went flawed as a result of you aren’t a part of the expertise. And more often than not I don’t assume folks have company over the recipe that they’re going to attempt.
We need to have a good time the cooking effort, that connection, that ritual of consuming along with household and buddies. So it’s not like we would like a toolkit that simply takes care of the cooking for us. We would like to see folks having fun with cooking with a bit of assist from the device to make the cooking course of simpler.
So how does the toolkit work?
DL: The toolkit is available in after a interval of trial and error. We discover that there are particular issues that we are able to quantify or digitize.
When folks from my hometown are making the sorts of meals we made for this paper, they don’t use a thermometer or a precision oven. They nonetheless use older methods which have been perfected over centuries. But in case you have been to maneuver this entire setup to a different place, every part adjustments — for instance, the humidity is completely different, crops have completely different protein content material and water has completely different alkalinity.
There are so many explanation why a recipe won’t work, and having a toolkit helps folks with that. It can alleviate a few of the ache by automating issues comparable to temperature management so as to give attention to the flavour, on the chemical response, on the adjustments between molecules.
We wished to raise folks’s sensitivity in the course of the strategy of cooking with a point of assist from easy automation.
The rice wine making course of is proven right here. While making the rice wine, Luo found that she wanted to regulate the temperature of the water tub the response was sitting in (metallic bowl, center panel) to maintain the rice wine from turning into vinegar.Luo et al./CHI 2023
In your paper, you mentioned the primary time you tried to make the rice wine, it turned out to be vinegar. Tell us in regards to the course of.
DL: For the rice wine, I discovered this database on-line the place folks have written scientific papers about wine fermentation. So I adopted their circumstances, nevertheless it simply didn’t end up. Then I needed to debug. The downside wasn’t with the thermometer I used to be utilizing. I had to determine different environmental components that we didn’t predict.
In this case, I didn’t have in mind that the chemical response of the rice and yeast combination may change the temperature. The change was so slight that the thermometer didn’t detect it and alter accordingly. I modified the temperature of the water tub that the response was sitting in to lastly efficiently make rice wine as a substitute of vinegar.
How did it really feel to make after which eat these meals out of your childhood?
Luo used the tofu she made in a recipe for mapo tofu, proven right here.Luo et al./CHI 2023
DL: I believe cooking is a course of that ought to be loved and celebrated. For instance, after I made the tofu, watching it curdle up was a part of the enjoyable. You can see how the chemical response occurs instantaneously. That’s actually gratifying for me. And that’s an expertise we wished to cross alongside. You should purchase packaged tofu from the grocery store and it tastes OK. But the enjoyable of creating it’s an irreplaceable expertise.
When I tasted the flour pores and skin spring roll, it introduced me again to after I was a child in my father’s hometown. This is avenue meals. It’s in a market and we’d stroll round and eat it collectively. It’s an incredible reminiscence.
This analysis was funded by the National Science Foundation.
For extra info, contact Luo at danlil@uw.edu.
Grant numbers: 2029249 and 2222242
Tag(s): College of Engineering • Daniela Rosner • Danli Luo • Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering • Nadya Peek
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