Many home cooks know the stress of opening the refrigerator at dinner time and finding missing ingredients. A reviewer testing a new artificial intelligence assistant in the NYT Cooking app found that the tool could quickly save a meal, though it also showed that cooks still need to pay close attention. When the tester wanted to make a chicken and rice dish without the required chicken thighs or fresh herbs, the assistant quickly rewrote the recipe to use chicken tenders and green beans, even adjusting the cooking times.
The new tool, released for app subscribers on Apple's iOS, does not change the original recipes, which were created and tested by human experts. Instead, users can type questions into a small box to customize meals, scale portions, or swap ingredients based on what they already have at home. The system was trained partly on reader comments, which often contain helpful solutions from people who have already tried different substitutions.
However, the technology is not perfect. While testing the tool across different recipes, the reviewer discovered that the assistant nearly ruined a dessert by suggesting half the butter needed for a cake. Editors say the tool is trained not to accept requests that will make dishes taste bad, but baking usually requires exact measurements. For now, the assistant can provide valuable guidance when kitchen supplies are limited, but cooks must still use their own common sense before turning on the oven.