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WIRED
10-07-2025
- General
- WIRED
AI Is a Lousy Chef
I asked an AI-powered recipe generator to make some menus. It didn't tell me to put glue in my guacamole, but the results didn't come close to besting recipes written by professionals. Photo-Illustration:All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. After my sage plant struggled for years in a shadowy corner of my roof-deck planter garden, I moved it into the sunniest spot up there. Boy did that make a difference. It also meant I needed to figure out what to do with all the leaves it produced. As luck would have it, I was also trying out AI cooking platforms. That night, I plugged the prompt 'recipe using brats and lots of sage' into an AI recipe generator and it gave me what it called 'sage infused brats skillet with caramelized onions.' Ooh, that sounds nice , I thought. The platform I prompted is called DishGen, one of the few services that specializes in AI cooking. It takes recipes from large language models like OpenAI and Anthropic and repackages them into more kitchen-friendly formats. It also gives users the ability to create meal plans. (Other tools, like ChefGPT and Epicure, offer similar features.) DishGen's sage-and-sausage recipe used only 2 tablespoons of sage, not exactly lots, but I picked my way through the steps and emerged with a pleasant-enough Tuesday dinner. I also needed to use a fair amount of my own kitchen experience to get it across the finish line. For example, the ingredients called for a 'large yellow onion, thinly sliced.' Shall we peel it? Cut in half before we slice it? Pole-to-pole or through the equator? And how thin is thin? It didn't say. People who like cooking from well-written recipes would find this frustrating. The recipe also calls for '2 tablespoons fresh sage leaves, chopped,' which comma lovers will appreciate, is confusing. Do you fold up those sage leaves and smash them into your tablespoon, then chop them? (It's clearer to call for the desired quantity of 'chopped fresh sage leaves.') Once I started cooking, the butter and sliced onions went into a skillet to 'cook slowly until caramelized, about 12 minutes,' and oh man, so many things. Are they just not feeling the stirring? What about some descriptions of things to watch for along the way so we know we're doing it right? I also noted at that point that it really wasn't much onion considering the recipe is for four people. My wife Elisabeth picked up on this right away when I set it down. 'Is that all of it, or is there more,' she asked. 'It just looks like a little blob.' In all my years of food, cookbook, and recipe writing, I can say with confidence that when testing a recipe from a new source, the chance that I happened to pick out the only bad apple in the bunch on my first try is witheringly small. When I looked for sage-heavy recipes in The New York Times Cooking section (which is also an app), one of the results was for Samin Nosrat's fried sage salsa verde. Did you notice how your ears perked up there? Maybe you even did a bit of involuntary salivating? I made it the following evening with some sous vide chicken thighs I had in the fridge and immediately appreciated the clarity of the instructions and the accompanying video of Nosrat hamming it up while making the dish. I was cooking something new to me, but simply by watching the video and reading over the recipe, I wasn't going in blind. Particularly helpful are the tips for frying the sage, which it turns out I've been overdoing. Fry it up until it stops bubbling, preferably in oil at 360 degrees Fahrenheit. Let it crisp on a paper-towel-lined tray, sprinkle it with some flaky salt, have a taste, and you will know instantly that you're onto something. Meal Ticket All the sage cooking reminded me of using Eat Your Books, a subscription website that creates an index of your cookbooks, allowing you to tell it what you'd like to cook, or ingredients you'd like to use, and it tells you which of your cookbooks to look in and what pages the recipes are on. If you have a good-sized cookbook library, this is a godsend. (EYB will soon launch a companion app for its website called CookShelf). Using EYB reminded me of the stunning chicken with gin and sage jus from Amy Thielen's cookbook, Company. It's so gripping and such a good use of sage that the Times wrote a story about it. Next up, I found some nice tomatillos at MacPherson's Fruit & Produce in Seattle, which got me craving a Mexican-style salsa verde. I told DishGen that I wanted to use 500 grams of tomatillos, a poblano pepper, and a jalapeño. Impressively, it spat out a recipe using exactly those amounts along with other classic ingredients like onion, cilantro, garlic, and lime juice. It called for "1/2 cup of chopped white onion" which would be better if it stated how large an onion you'd need and perhaps how big to chop it. The recipe goes on to have you char the tomatillo and peppers, but mysteriously not the onion and garlic, which you add to the blender just before serving. Yes, there's a bit of salt and lime juice in there, but not enough to soften the double raw allium edge. The AI recipe writing always felt, as a colleague once put it, squirrelly and weird. Thankfully, Eat Your Books pointed me toward another salsa verde from Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral's Asada , where similar ingredients are charred then brought to a simmer after going in the blender. It was too late for me to char the onion and garlic in my AI salsa, but I did use the simmering-at-the-end idea, pouring mine from the blender into a pot on the stove, successfully tamping down the dragon breath. Following that, I did a head-to-head with classic food processor pesto, making one version from DishGen and another from Marcella Hazan, whose name might give you a sense of a forthcoming ass whooping. Yet I was pleased to find the DishGen pesto was fairly solid, although it oxidized and turned brown more quickly than I would have liked. Marcella's pesto, from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking , is elevated with smart tips like using both Parmesan and Romano for a deeper flavor and folding in the cheeses after the sauce has been through the food processor, which makes for a nicer texture. She also has a Mortal Kombat –level finishing move, incorporating room-temperature butter into the sauce right at the end, that gives your pasta a luxurious silkiness. I thought about making a third batch pulling directly from ChatGPT, but its classic pesto recipe turned out to feature pine nuts that you lightly toast without telling you how to do that. In a pan? On a burner? In the oven? What temperature? Sorry, I'll pass. For comparison, I looked at America's Test Kitchen's food processor pesto and saw its recipe tells you to quickly and cleverly blanch the basil leaves in boiling water to keep the sauce from browning, a trick I'll incorporate into my future pesto making, no matter where the recipe is from. Food for Thought Recipe writing is both an art form and a style of technical writing with rules; there are excellent reference textbooks to help recipe writers get it right. Good recipes help cut down on confusion while guiding you to great results. They list ingredients in the order they are used when cooking, for example. They favor clear waypoints—often instructing you to rely on your eyes or ears—as the primary way to know it's time to move to the next step, as relying on saying how long something should take can be misleading and frustrating. Many of the AI-created recipes have not picked up on the rules or the art that can make cooking efficient, enjoyable, and delicious. For me, though, the real problem using AI to create recipes emerged when I asked the DishGen chatbot questions about copyright. 'The recipes I create are original compositions generated based on general culinary knowledge, common cooking techniques, and widely known flavor pairings. They are not copied from any specific copyrighted source but are instead uniquely formulated to suit your ingredients and preferences. This approach ensures that the recipes are both safe to use and free from copyright concerns.' I remembered that DishGen doesn't create the recipes, it culls them from other LLMs like OpenAI and Anthropic. I then asked if it could do something in the style of America's Test Kitchen. 'I don't have direct access to specific recipes from America's Test Kitchen or other copyrighted cookbooks to display their exact content. However, I can help you create a recipe inspired by the style and techniques commonly used by America's Test Kitchen, focusing on reliable methods, balanced flavors, and clear instructions.' Then it offered a creamy chicken and sage recipe 'inspired by Americas Test Kitchen style.' The phrase 'direct access' stuck in my head and, on a hunch, I looked at The Atlantic's story by Alex Reisner where readers can search for an authors' names in LibGen, the pirated library of 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers that Meta and Open AI have used in the past to train their AI products like ChatGPT. The LibGen list included pirated work from Elisabeth and from me and from thousands of other authors, but I was stunned to when I typed in 'America's Test Kitchen' and 163 results came up, scores of their books like Paleo Perfected , Air Fryer Perfection , Foolproof Fish , and The Complete Baby and Toddler Cookbook. 'It feels like AI is in its Napster phase,' a recipe editor and culinary librarian friend of mine once quipped, 'except the pirates are some of the world's biggest companies.' ATK is a prodigious publisher and everything on the Atlantic list appears to have been scraped by LibGen. It was then likely hoovered up by Meta and Open AI, perhaps shedding light on how the sage sausage gets made. It's possible that part of the database the two companies used did not help train their products to write recipes. It's possible it did. Working backward, I prompted DishGen for a chorizo and black bean chimichanga like the one in ATK's The Best Mexican Recipes , and DishGen created something quite different. Then I looked for a slow cooker spaghetti squash with tomato sauce like the one in ATK's Multicooker Perfection , and DishGen brought up something surprisingly similar that included just about everything on the ATK ingredient list except tomato paste. Right after this, I looked at the list of recipes I had cooked in DishGen and the illustrated thumbnails looked surprisingly like the work of Sarah Becan, whose wonderful Let's Make Dumplings and Let's Make Ramen , both with chef Hugh Amano, are part of the LibGen database. DishGen did not respond to a request for comment. Despite all this, so many of the AI-generated recipes I found were neither interesting nor well written, meaning cooking from them becomes more difficult and less rewarding. 'When I've tried AI recipes it feels like the engine has scraped details from many sources and then spit out a sort of weird recipe average,' says Dan Souza, chief content officer at America's Test Kitchen. 'You might get something that is baseline tasty, but it's never memorable. Which makes sense. No one is tasting it before you try it.' One of DishGen's services is meal planning, which would be intriguing if the recipes it pulls from the LLMs were more notable. It's an interesting service and the repackaging it does is impressive, but it is pulling from often-underwhelming source material. Home cooks would be better served if it could point people at better recipes or if the LLMs licensed great recipes from trusted sources. Here are a couple ideas: Instead of turning your meals over to those LLMs with ethically dubious sourcing and no taste buds, use the money you would've spent on an AI recipe subscription to buy a few cookbooks—here are dozens of suggestions for all skill levels—or get a subscription to ATK ($80/year), or New York Times Cooking ($50/year). If you have a bunch of cookbooks, try Eat Your Books/CookShelf ($40/year). If you want meal plans with recipes created by a chef, try Ends and Stems ($114/year). Right before I wrapped up, I typed 'brats and sage' into NYT Cooking and it came back with Country-Sausage and Sage Dressing. And even without cooking it, I just decided that won, because I trust them.
Daily Record
01-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Record
Recipe for the perfect Ayrshire new potatoes as fresh produce hits the shelves
Ayrshire New Potatoes, affectionately known as Ayrshire Earlies, have hit the shelves after coming back into season. Ayrshire foodies have been flocking to the supermarkets after the annual return of seasonal Ayrshire New Potatoes. Affectionately known as Ayrshire Earlies, the variety are Scotland's first potatoes of the year and are renowned for their distinctive "earthy, nutty and sweet flavour" with a "creamy yet firm" texture. Assigned Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status, the Ayrshire Earlies are only grown by local farmers in the county's unique coastal soils. The Epicure breed of potatoes dates back to 1897 and it has become synonymous with Ayrshire potatoes for its unique flavour and frost resistance. To mark the launch of Ayrshire season, Scotty Brand are highlighting a traditional in a bid to showcase the best of these early potatoes. For the perfect Ayrshire New Potatoes Boil the whole potatoes for 15 minutes or until tender, drain and then throw them into a large bowl. Add a dollop of butter and sprinkle with salt - try Wee Knob of Butter's Truffle & Black Pepper alongside Blackthorn Scottish sea salt flakes for a uniquely Scottish flavour. Serve and enjoy the delicious simplicity of Ayrshire potatoes. Scotty Brand works closely with Drew Young from Girvan Early Growers to produce Ayrshire Potatoes. Drew Young is a generational farmer with both his sons now integrated into the family farm. A spokesperson for Scotty Brand said: "Scotty Brand, Scotland's trusted name in fresh, local produce, is delighted to announce the arrival of the much-anticipated Ayrshire season, marking the start of the Scottish potato harvest with its celebrated Ayrshire New Potatoes. "The region's mild climate, warmed by the Gulf Stream, and the use of seaweed fertilisers from local beaches, create the perfect growing conditions for these premium spuds. This coastal influence allows for earlier planting and harvesting, making Ayrshire New Potatoes available from May to July—a highlight of Scotland's food calendar. "At Scotty Brand, we believe that eating with the seasons is essential for taste, nutrition, and sustainability. "Scottish produce, grown in its natural season, is fresher, more flavourful, and has a lower environmental impact. Ayrshire New Potatoes are a perfect example of how seasonal eating connects us to Scotland's rich agricultural heritage and supports local farmers."
CBC
24-02-2025
- Business
- CBC
It's legal, but is it lucrative? Inside the risky world of multi-level marketing
Multi-level marketing is nothing new. From Tupperware to Avon, these commission-based sales positions have been a popular way to make money from home. But sometimes, business can come to a screeching halt. That's what happened to Amanda Kirby and every other Epicure ambassador in Canada. Kirby, who lives in Pouch Cove, N.L., has been both a consultant and a customer of Epicure for half a decade. The B.C.-based seasoning and culinary brand is labelled as gluten and allergen-free, which makes it very attractive, she said. Epicure is one of many popular companies that use multi-level marketing. According to the Competition Bureau, "a multi-level marketing plan promotes the supply of a product to participants in the plan. Participants earn compensation based on supplying products to other participants or customers." Commission-based consultants are considered self-employed by the Canadian Revenue Agency. Kirby did not start selling Epicure products for the money, she said, but because her son — who has autism — is particularly fond of it. However, she told CBC News she sees why it is a seemingly popular trend to become a consultant on the island. "You can do it from the comfort of your own home," said Kirby. But, as with any business, there is a level of risk. The costs of business Epicure ceased operations after entering bankruptcy in January, leaving its sales community in the dark, Kirby said. "I just woke up and I heard my friends were messaging me, like, asking me if I had certain products," Kirby said. "And I was like, why is everybody so eager all of a sudden? And I found out that they were going through a rough time." People are still able to order from Epicure's website — which is advertising a liquidation sale — but Kirby said she hasn't had any communication from the company. She doesn't know what will happen next. Although Epicure is not Kirby's main source of income, Concordia University marketing lecturer Robert Soroka said people can get in over their heads when being involved in multi-level marketing. "When you lose your own distributor … you're going to lose the clients as well," said Soroka. "There's a significant sacrifice." Soroka also noted how the products sold by multi-level marketing companies are typically much more expensive than regular retail companies — and the price tag affects both the customers and the sellers. Former Scentsy consultant Emily Pretty, who lives in St. John's, warns against investing too much money into such companies. Scentsy is an Idaho-based company that sells scented wax, sprays and more. "Between samples and gift boxes and the little knickknacks and business cards and website renewals, I would say I easily spent six or seven grand, easy," said Pretty. The St. John's woman said she made "nowhere near" that amount in profit in her five-year run of selling Scentsy products. Scentsy consultants are technically considered "independent business owners" by the company, marketing officer Mark Stastny wrote to CBC News. He said, "their financial returns will be directionally proportional to the effort they put in." For this reason, Pretty stressed that it is important to do research before taking on the risk of losing money or failing to build a customer base. "You can be a boss babe. You can have your own business," said Pretty. "If you're going to spend the money to earn money, spend the money on yourself. Invest in yourself, not someone else." Multi-level marketing versus pyramid schemes Scentsy's website claims to be a "party planning" company that gives people the opportunity to sample products and eventually become a consultant. In an emailed a statement to CBC News, Stastny wrote that the company "does utilize a multi-level compensation plan that technically classifies the company as an MLM." Stastny's statement also said, "if a company leads with product and has real customers willing to pay for their products or services, chances are they are a healthy company providing value to the market," referring to common conceptions that paint MLM companies as predatory or even illegal pyramid schemes. Soroka told CBC that the idea of a pyramid scheme is that each level is making money for someone else on a higher level — oftentimes pushing a product with little to no value. At some point, the people on the lowest level of the so-called business pyramid will have no money left. "It's just a sham," Soroka said. Multi-level marketing is legal, but difficult, according to the lecturer. "Multi-level marketing, it's just another way of cultivating a distribution channel," said Soroka. "It's not the easiest way to turn a buck." Soroka said consultants are often dependent on others on their team who are just as motivated as they are. One current consultant in St. John's can attest to that. The smell of success Dana Hennessey's home office is a hub for business. It's where she packs up orders, balances books and makes a living. Hennessey sells products for Scentsy, and is soon entering her 10th year of representing the company. Her home, which was doused with the warm seasonal scents of her products, is a reflection of her dedication to the business. The work-from-home mother has heard the "boss babe" jokes and accusations of wrongdoing plenty of times. "I would never choose something that would, you know, intentionally hurt other people or scam other people," Hennessey said in an interview, sitting in her living room. "Sometimes people have different mindsets on things and I can't really change that…. So I took it upon myself to try and prove them wrong in that aspect. And I would try to run the business in a very ethical way," said Hennessey. Hennessey told CBC News that people are increasingly skeptical and even hostile toward people who represent companies similar to Scentsy, but she doesn't let it stop her. Thinking about getting into multi-level marketing? Here's a few things you should know 9 minutes ago Duration 2:38 Since the days of Tupperware parties, salespeople have used multi-level marking strategies to sell their products. But how successful are they, and why does one marketing expert say they shouldn't be confused with a pyramid scheme? It is now her sole source of income. Hennessey is an example of success in this business, but Soroka still encourages caution. Soroka told CBC News that multi-level marketing, or direct sales, "attracts people who are incorrectly looking for a quick get-rich-quick scheme. It attracts people who might not have the professional or academic credibility to get into a company in a sales position." The marketing lecturer said people should know what they are getting involved in before setting up shop.
