Day 6 of 30 Day AI Challenge – AI-Curated Recipes To Quench Your Food Cravings

Day 6 of the #30DayAIChallenge is here, and it’s all about food!

For those just joining us, every day during this challenge, I’m going to try and do something different or better, using currently available Artificial Intelligence tools.

A quick search for AI powered recipes turned up quite a few hits, not ALL delivering quite the same functionalities, though. For example, Whisk is a clever little app that allows you to save all the recipes you find, extract handy information and even create a shopping list that can go straight to 29+ online retailers. Taking a few extra minutes on recipe entry also unlocks Whisk’s powerful features. Its smart technology enhances meal planning with visual ingredient icons, nutritional calculations, and health scores. Powered by Whisk’s “Food Genome”—a deep learning algorithm that maps ingredient properties—the platform boasts over 500 million monthly interactions.

Then there’s Recipes by AI, which offers up a tailor made recipe by entering a list of ingredients…I gave it a shot. I was fully expecting the system to come back with a ‘Palak Paneer’ type dish given the ingredients but it provided a nice continental choice instead. Perhaps the system would benefit from allowing users to specify a cuisine and other parameters, e.g. dietary preferences, low salt, heat level, etc.

Another interesting find – EatKind, an AI-driven search engine, promises to effortlessly veganize recipes for seasoned herbivores and flexitarians alike. Users input a recipe and instantly receive plant-based substitutes for non-vegan ingredients. I tried pasting a link, which didn’t work…then typed in a dish name (Tandoori Chicken), which resulted in a few options from popular sites…when selecting one, the system basically just spits out a few alternative products with search links associated with each. While the idea is a nice one, the execution is far from useful or slick.

Then there’s ChefGPT, which offers a free and paid version…it’s hard to tell if this tool actually leverages the OpenAI GPT models, or is just opportunistically named. I tried ‘PantryChef’ and put in the same ingredients, getting the following result:

Not bad, but not too different from Recipes by AI either…plus there’s no way to guide the system on dietary or taste preferences.

Finally, here’s good old ChatGPT, with a variety of tests. The first ask was simplest, and interestingly enough, the system produced a very similar response to Recipes by AI…Stuffed Mushrooms!

Now, to introduce a few preferences like speed and heat level…interestingly it does adjust the number of chillies and substitutes the skillet with the microwave for speed. The reduced cook time for the mushrooms seems touch and go, but maybe the broiler (vs oven) would do the trick – hard to say without actually trying it out. Not bad!

Let’s try a different cuisine. I asked ChatGPT to use the same ingredients but create a spicy, vegan Indian dish instead. The system smartly removes Cottage Cheese from the recipe and provides a pretty robust Indian dish using the right spices and Coconut Milk / Cashew Cream as a vegan substitute.

Lastly, a quick test to see if it can tweak the recipe to factor in a potential nut allergy and a low-sodium diet…

…and a nutritional summary:

ChatGPT continues to impress. While I’m not a nutritionist (and an average chef at best, with a penchant for cooking spicy, comfort food), the recipes and information generated feel pretty useful and relevant. There are hundreds of great recipe tools and websites out there but the edge here is the ability to have a natural language chat and dig deeper till you’re happy with the result and have everything you need…it also saves on searching for every additional piece of information separately.

What are your thoughts on the output above and ChatGPT capabilities plus potential downsides? (esp. any talented chefs or cooks reading this) Any other tools or apps out there that help customize recipes for your food cravings really well? Leave a comment and let us know!

Till tomorrow…