With the desire to reduce the consumption of single-use plastic in the practice of tempeh fermentation, we designed a 3D printable tempeh mould. We print this mould in PETG, as this type of plastic is food-grade by design and heat-resistant.
The design is pretty simple, but smooth and balanced. It consists of a 150x100x30 mm container (3mm of thickness) with a lid. There are small perforations all around the container and on the lid to allow the tempeh to breath during the fermentation process. The lid has notches to hold two rubber bands to keep the soybeans compacted inside. And the bottom part of container has a removable coin to easily remove the tempeh from the mould after incubation.
A smaller version of 120x80x30 mm container is also available.
The 3D printed mould can be put in the dishwasher as long as the mode used does not exceed 75°C! If you wash it by hand, we advise you to sterilise it with a clean cloth and alcohol before each use.
Collaboration
We teamed up with Valentina from My Vegan Fam to improve our 3D printed tempeh mould In the context of the Hyper Global / Hyper Local exchange programme.
Valentina is a professional tempeh maker based in Amsterdam. She has a burning passion for tempeh and that pushes her to get out and spread the love for this fantastic food. She is the one who gave us her tempeh recipe when we were in Amsterdam two years ago.
She tested our moulds and give us feedback, we then co-designed the next version and finally, we supported her to 3D print the new version in a local makerspace in order to test the distributed design and decentralised fabrication side of the project.