After searching for the right size nozzle for the BotBQ I needed to test it… Searching was a problem because I knew that those small syringes used in other types of extruders (clay, marzipan,chocolate, masa) just wouldn’t hold enough beef for the burgers I had in mind for the BotBQ. I needed a rugged heavy duty type of nozzle that would be able to extrude meat at a good circumference that would put enough on the printing platform that we would be able to not wait too long for our burger to be printed and also make nice think juicy burger sizes.
I went through all of my wife’s baking supplies and tried to modify several of them, she was not pleased about that, and found a good size nozzle that was used for baking type stuff but didn’t have the strength I thought I would need to handle the pressure of the extruder motor for the BotBQ. It was just a solid piece of plastic with a screw on handle for applying pressure to push the food out. I wanted something metal (of course for the design to come the whole contraption I hope to be metal to withstand the heat of a real BBQ) and thick, and strong, and with a more ‘Manly’ look to it.
Searching through the various stores here in Germany and on the internet I just didn’t see what I envisioned until one day I was at a Toom near to where we live and saw it… The Holy Grail of manly baking extruders!
It came with several sizes of attachments for your extruding pleasure but I didn’t feel that any of them were big enough to do what I wanted. In time, and with more testing there may be many different sizes used for hamburger extrusion, but I wanted to start with something thick because I am no engineer and I had no idea on what gear ratio’s I would need to adjust to get the correct amount of pressure to extrude the meat correctly.
At first I thought I would play around with the different sizes and they were just as I expected, needing a lot of pressure to extrude the meat. I had the meat ground over 4 times to make sure it was had a nice smooth consistency (which I picked up at Toom as well). I haven’t tried with meat ground more than 4 times yet at that point and in the future we may just start playing with Leberkäse as well because it has the consistency of ground up fake hot dog meat and pours out with ease.
When I just used the regular nozzle with no attachment on I got the thickness I had seen in my dreams and was super excited…. now just to figure out how to get this whole printing hamburger thing figured out which should be the easy part… right?!
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