I Cooked a Pizza on a 3D Printer

A heated 3D printer bed can reach well over 100°C. That is normally useful for keeping large prints stuck to the build plate, reducing warping and printing more demanding materials.

It also sounds suspiciously close to a cooking temperature.

That raised an obvious question that absolutely nobody needed answered: could I use a 3D printer to cook an entire day’s worth of food?

The plan was to make breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert using nothing but the heated bed of a 3D printer. No oven, no hob and no microwave.

Just several thousand pounds’ worth of precision manufacturing equipment and some aluminium foil.

The rules

I was not going to attempt cooking raw meat on a printer. There are limits, even for me.

Anything that genuinely needed to be cooked through would either be relatively low risk, like an egg or pancake batter, or it would already be cooked and simply need heating.

The menu was:

• Fried egg for breakfast
• A cheese quesadilla for lunch
• Tortilla pizza for dinner
• Pancakes for dessert

My Prusa XL heated bed can reach 115°C, while my enclosed Eryone Thinker X400 can reach 120°C. For most of the experiment, I used the Prusa XL with aluminium foil placed over the build plate.

I cleaned the plate beforehand, but I still had no intention of placing food directly onto it.

This is also not a recommendation or a tutorial. Heated beds are designed for 3D printing, not cooking. The printers themselves certainly did not seem thrilled about what I was doing.

Breakfast: frying an egg on a Prusa XL

I started with something that should actually cook rather than simply warm up.

The bed was set to 115°C and covered with foil. I added a little oil and waited to see whether it would heat properly through the aluminium.

To my surprise, the oil began bubbling.

That was enough encouragement to crack an egg directly onto the bed.

Almost immediately, I discovered the first major design flaw in my cooking setup. A printer build plate does not have raised edges, so the uncooked egg began spreading across the foil and moving dangerously close to the rest of the machine.

I managed to contain most of it, and the white slowly started turning opaque.

It was definitely cooking. It just was not cooking particularly well.

A fried egg, eventually

The problem was the speed.

A frying pan transfers a lot of heat into the food very quickly. The heated bed reached a similar temperature, but it did not behave like a normal pan. The egg cooked slowly, unevenly and developed a strange film across the surface.

It also triggered an error on the printer.

The Prusa XL detected an unusual temperature change in one of the heated bed tiles and began rebooting. Apparently, placing an egg on the bed was not part of the expected operating conditions.

After restarting the heat and leaving it for longer, the egg eventually became solid enough to eat.

There was no realistic way to flip it, so the bottom became firm while the top slowly cooked from the surrounding heat.

The finished egg looked horrific.

The white was rubbery, the underside had a texture closer to a hard-boiled egg, and the entire thing had taken far longer than it would have in a frying pan.

It still tasted like an egg, though.

Compared with a properly fried egg, I would give it a five out of ten. Considering it had been cooked on a 3D printer, that felt surprisingly generous.

Lunch: making a quesadilla

Lunch seemed much more achievable.

Rather than trying to cook anything from raw, I only needed the heated bed to warm a tortilla and melt some cheese.

I placed a fresh sheet of foil on the printer, added a little oil and put down the first tortilla. On top of that went grated mature cheddar, chopped onion and Cajun seasoning.

The cheese began melting almost immediately.

This was already going much better than breakfast.

Once the cheese had softened, I placed another tortilla on top and carefully flipped the whole thing so both sides could warm against the foil.

The result looked almost completely normal.

The outside was warm, the cheese had melted properly and the onions still had a little crunch. With some sweet sriracha ketchup, it was genuinely good.

This was the first point in the experiment where using a 3D printer almost made sense.

Almost.

Dinner: 3D printer tortilla pizza

Dinner was the reason for the video.

I wanted to cook a pizza on a 3D printer, but raw pizza dough was never going to cook properly on the heated bed. It needed something thin enough to warm quickly, so I used a tortilla as the base.

The toppings were:

• Tomato purée
• Brown onion
• Mushrooms
• Pre-cooked chicken
• Grated cheddar

The chicken was already cooked because I was not going to trust a printer bed with raw poultry.

I spread the tomato purée over the tortilla, added the toppings and finished it with enough cheese to hold everything together.

To help trap the heat, I covered the pizza while it was on the bed. This allowed the warmth to build above the toppings rather than only heating the base.

After a few minutes, the cheese had melted and the chicken was warm.

The tortilla had also crisped slightly underneath, giving it something close to a thin-crust pizza texture.

Did the 3D printed pizza taste good?

Honestly, yes.

It looked better than expected, smelled like a pizza and held together when sliced.

It was never going to compete with an actual oven-cooked pizza. The mushrooms were still fairly raw, the tortilla base was very thin and there was no real browning on top.

But as a collection of ingredients heated on a 3D printer, it worked remarkably well.

Compared with every pizza I have ever eaten, it was probably a three out of ten.

Compared with the other food I had cooked on a printer, it was easily a ten.

I would genuinely eat it again. I would just use an oven next time.

Dessert: printer-bed pancakes

The pizza had gone far too well, so dessert restored balance to the experiment.

I made a thicker pancake batter than I would normally use. In the UK, I would usually make something closer to a thin crêpe, but I thought a thicker batter might hold its shape better on the printer.

It did not.

The outside slowly began to set, but the middle remained wet for a long time. Just like the egg, the batter was not receiving enough heat quickly enough.

Eventually, it became solid enough to move with a spatula.

Calling it a pancake would be generous.

It looked like raw cookie dough, drywall filler or something that had been left behind during a building renovation. The outside was dry, the centre had an unpleasant texture and there was no clean way to flip it.

It was technically edible.

That is the nicest thing I can say about it.

The flavour was plain, the texture was horrible and I had no sugar, syrup, chocolate spread or other toppings available to rescue it.

The pancake was a failure.

What can you actually cook on a 3D printer?

A heated bed can cook an egg eventually, but it does it slowly and badly. There is no good reason to choose it over a frying pan.

It can also cook pancake batter, although the result suggests that it probably should not.

Where the heated bed works surprisingly well is with food that only needs warming or melting.

The quesadilla and tortilla pizza both succeeded because the ingredients did not require intense heat. The printer only needed to warm the tortilla, melt the cheese and heat the pre-cooked fillings.

In theory, it could also warm an existing pizza slice or keep something hot. That does not mean I recommend turning your printer into an expensive warming tray.

Was cooking on a 3D printer worth it?

Absolutely not.

The egg took too long, the pancake was grim and the printer repeatedly reminded me that it had not been designed for this.

The quesadilla was genuinely good, and the pizza was far better than it had any right to be. Neither result justified using a 3D printer instead of normal kitchen equipment.

Still, the experiment answered the question.

Yes, it is possible to cook food on a heated 3D printer bed. You can fry an egg, melt cheese, crisp a tortilla and produce something recognisable as pizza.

You should not, but you can.

Most importantly, the Prusa XL survived, the food was edible and I did not spend the following day regretting my decisions.

That counts as a successful experiment.