4th Feb 2025
Call out: we're looking for Experimental Kitchen projects!
Are you a student, staff member or researcher at UCL who's interested in making with edible and food-safe materials?
This February, we're inviting inducted members to submit their kitchen project ideas to us— and we'll choose a small number of submissions to join us in testing our Experimental Kitchen facilities in March.
More information
What is the Experimental Kitchen?
Our new food-safe space will allow inducted members to work on edible projects with domestic, traditional and commercial kitchen tools and processes with technical support. If you have a project idea that you'd like to explore, we'd love to hear about it as we test our new facilities, systems and processed before we open the space.
Project proposals that we'd like to test
If you have a specific research or work project in mind that needs a food-safe lab, or an experimental personal project you’ve always wanted to develop but need some technical support for, we'd love to hear about it. Even if we don’t have the tools or expertise right now, knowing what you might need in the future will help us build the Experimental Kitchen facility of your dreams.
For example, you could be: creating edible objects for an experiment; recreating a historical or fictional foodstuff; investigating the structure, flavour or mouthfeel of a new (food-safe) substance; preparing an animal, vegetable or mineral from scratch; or exploring a particular process, tool or kitchen skill.
Tools and equipment to be inspired by
Our Experimental Kitchen will be home to a wide range of brand-new, state-of-the-art tools, including...
- Vacuum packer/ sealer Commercial convection oven and large combi (steam/convection) oven
- Commercial microwave oven
- Commercial dishwasher
- Lab fridge and freezer
- Blast freezer
- Fitted, portable and precision induction hobs
- Hotplate stirrer
- Dehydrator
- Foldable proofer/fermentation box
- Vacuum packer/ sealer
- Sous vide wand
- XL food processor
- XL blender
- Stick blender/whisks
- Spice grinder
- Ice cream maker
- Stand mixers
- Pasta roller and extruder
- Grain mill
- Mincer and sausage stuffer
- Food mill
- Tortilla press
- Pressure cooker
- Blow torch
- pH probe
...And many more hand tools and utensils.
Submit a proposal for a test project
To be considered for this opportunity, please submit a short form that will help us understand what you'd like to explore in our space.
From this information, we’ll invite a few people to discuss their ideas or plans with our workshop team, and then we’ll select a small range of projects to run as test sessions on Mondays and Tuesdays between 17th March to 1st April. If your project is selected, you will also need to attend a training session on Monday 10th or Tuesday 11th March.
Please log your proposal through this form.
Submission deadline: Sunday 16th February 23:59.
Not an Inducted Member yet? To help us with the planning of the space, we're interested in hearing about all kinds of projects from members and non-members alike - but please note, only Inducted Members will be offered a test slot.