There is thread on leveraging AI but I thought recipes and wine pairing might be worthwhile for a specific thread - I’m interested in people’s general experiences as well as any actual results. Also suggestions as to the best AI for this although I’m quite impressed with “chefGPT”.
I would not have expected a LLM to be much good at this, given the specifics of the task, but a friend used it last week with success so I thought I’d give it a try.
I used it last night to tweak a simple meal I’d planned to work with specific red and white wines (a couple of people don’t drink red). I’ll put the details in a separate post
General observations:
I was impressed with the level of detail, and the way it explained its rationale for certain things to achieve the wine pairing objectives
It was very good at adapting to my comments , we went through three or four iterations
It produced a step by step timeline.
It produced text plating suggestion and also generated an image.
(this may be due to my being a beginner at ChatGPT) , it was a bit clumsy to export the results to iOS Files for filing with my other online recipes.
My biggest question right now is, are ther better AI bots for this?
I think there’s some potential for searching across multiple sites I trust, as long as it’s giving me links and not recipes directly. For the last few years, an ingredient and recipe search yields a huge number of hits I care nothing about, i.e. more chaff than most kinds of searches I do.
Here’s the results. I didn’t really need ChatGPT to do this but I thought it would be a good exercise for the bot, and I was pretty sure I’d be able to decide whether to follow suggestions or not (we had guests so no leaps in the dark!). I decided to follow exactly with one slight change.
No big surprises, but several small ones compared to my expectations for what a LLM based bot would do. Which I guess shows I don’t understand how these things work. I thought it was basically probabilities of word sequences, with bells on. .
Some comments
using the bbq sauce for just a thin glaze on the turkey (rather than thick gloop I guess) and serving a small bowl of sauce with each plate
The chopped fresh thyme on the potato pucks
It likes to show off; there was a sidetrack in telling me how to slice the mushrooms to make a fan
It’s focus on connecting the components (a dash of bbq sauce into the mushrooms)
And its need to give the rationale for everything. Actually it was helpful
Not out of the way for a real chef to suggest but I was impressed by the bot .
It all turned out very well , universal praise for the dish. Being a very social event I wasn’t able to get a photo.
The one “issue” was with the fennel. Looking at the picture, and considering the size of the zucchini batons I decided to cut the fennel in eighths not quarters (I usually do quarters). I dropped five minutes off the cooking time but some of the pieces were still starting to “over-caramelise “. I also used an orange flavoured olive oil and a splash of orange juice rather than lemon.
Not sure what counts as chaff. My regular recipes come from all kinds of sources, which include supermarket cookbook, web searches and of course chefs I like.
I’d agree that looking for recipes for unfamiliar ingredients or techniques I’d certainly start with known chefs or sources like Epicurious - either chefs I follow or known experts for the issue in question. But where I’m looking for ideas in an area I’m comfortable with I often cast the net wider (no pun intended)
As I said for this experiment I picked something I wouldn’t normally use recipes for and I’d know if I was being led up a dark alley. At the start I didn’t expect to follow its recipe, but I the end I did after a few iterations.
I guess I mean I rely on people I trust for what I don’t know. I can find recipes from unknown bloggers interesting, but probably 50-60% of those I review I can tell as an amateur cook wouldn’t work for me. I am usually more interested in technique, chefs I’m familiar with or Kenji’s crazy testing
I agree that AI apps are intriguing for developing or modifying a recipe. I especially like the interaction and give and take. I had some really good experiences doing this with the app Claude. So much so, that I sometimes refer to the app as “Chez Claude”.