Engineering | Expert Citations | Research | University of California News Blog
May 23, 2023
Danli Luo, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin who studies human-centered design and engineering, used it to recreate three dishes she grew up in China: spring roll skins (shown here), tofu, and sake. We have developed a helpful sensor and controller toolkit.Luo et al./CHI 2023
Many of us remember certain foods we enjoyed as children, such as the special pies our grandparents made for us, the delicious annual holiday treats, and the spring rolls from the street vendors. However, while the memory of that experience is readily available, the recipe for making that dish is not. Even with recipes accessed online or passed down through generations, it’s hard to balance the complex process of cooking with the sensory details that come from memory.
What if technology could reduce the effort of recreating recipes? A thermometer to monitor temperature, or a muddler to continuously mix ingredients? You can focus all your attention on the details of your memory, such as taste, texture, and smell.
Danli Luo, a PhD student in Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington, has developed a toolkit of sensors and controllers to help recreate three dishes he grew up with in China: sake, tofu, and spring roll skins. developed.
Luo presented the project at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems on April 25th. Daniela Rosner, California State University Associate Professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, and Nadia Peake, California State University Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, are also co-authors of the paper.
UW News spoke with Luo about the study.
Danli LuoUniversity of Washington
What inspired you to do this project?
Danli Luo: It all started when my advisor and I were brainstorming about scents and spices. There is a very special spice called lycea oil that I don’t think is common in Western culinary traditions or even in Asian culinary traditions. It’s unique to my parents’ birthplace, thousands of miles from here. So the inspiration for this project was to develop a toolkit to help recreate culturally meaningful dishes. All three of his dishes that I made for this thesis used different spices that I have been using since childhood. I had to search the internet quite a bit to find litsey oil. And it’s still a little different than what I remember.
Why should food be personally important to use this method?
DL: If you’ve never tried a dish, how can you recreate your personal experience from that dish? Good for things where the process is completely incomprehensible.
Toolkits help simplify that process. Then measure the final product from memory. In the process of recreating these dishes, we are able to draw joy and connection with our family and loved ones.
How is your toolkit different from other “precision cooking” techniques such as Instant Pots and bread makers?
DL: Instant Pot is a great tool, but it automates everything. When something goes wrong, you don’t understand what happened. I’ll have to start over, but since I wasn’t part of the experience, I still don’t know what went wrong or why. And most of the time, I don’t think people have autonomy over the recipes they try.
We want to celebrate the culinary endeavour, the connection that comes with it, the ritual of dining with family and friends. So you don’t want a toolkit that just does the cooking for you. We hope that you will enjoy cooking with tools that reduce the hassle of cooking.
So how does the toolkit work?
DL: The toolkit was perfected after a period of trial and error. We realized that there are things that can be quantified or digitized.
People in my hometown don’t use thermometers or precision ovens when making food like we do for this paper. They still use old techniques perfected over the centuries. But when I move this whole setting to another place, everything changes. For example, humidity varies, crops have different protein content, and water alkalinity varies.
There are many reasons why recipes don’t work, and having a toolkit solves them. Automating things like temperature control takes some of the pain away and lets you focus on flavors, chemical reactions, and molecular changes.
We wanted to increase people’s sensibilities in the cooking process with some help from simple automation.
We will introduce the manufacturing process of sake. While making rice wine, Luo found that the temperature of the reaction water tank (metal bowl, center panel) had to be adjusted to prevent the rice wine from turning into vinegar. rice field.Luo et al./CHI 2023
In your paper you mention that when you first tried to make sake, it turned out to be vinegar. Please tell us about that process.
DL: For rice wine, I found a database online with scientific papers on wine fermentation. So I tried to follow their terms, but it didn’t work. Then I had to debug. I had no issues with the thermometer I was using. We had to figure out other environmental factors that we hadn’t anticipated.
In this case, I didn’t take into account that the temperature could change due to chemical reactions in the rice-yeast mixture. The change was so slight that the thermometer could not detect it and adjust accordingly. By changing the temperature of the tank containing the reaction solution, I finally succeeded in making sake instead of vinegar.
How did it feel to make and eat these foods from your childhood?
Luo used her tofu in the mapo tofu recipe presented here.Luo et al./CHI 2023
DL: I think cooking is a process that should be enjoyed and celebrated. For example, when I made tofu, watching it harden was part of the fun. You can see how the chemical reaction happens instantaneously. It’s really fun for me. And that’s the experience we wanted to convey. You can buy packed tofu at the supermarket, but the taste is so-so. But the fun of making is an experience that can’t be replaced by anything.
When I ate the flour crusted spring rolls, I remembered my childhood in my father’s hometown. This is street food. It’s in the market, so we walked around and ate it together. Great memories.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
For more information, please contact Luo (danlil@uw.edu).
Grant Numbers: 2029249 and 2222242
Tags: Faculty of Engineering • Daniella Rosner • Danli Luo • Faculty of Human Centered Design Engineering • Nadia Peake