NYT Cooking AI Assistant: Tested by The Verge
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Senior Reviewer at The Verge, tests the new AI assistant feature on the NYT Cooking iOS app for recipe substitutions and scaling.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- NYT Cooking app introduces an AI assistant for iOS subscribers to customize recipes on demand.
- The Verge reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy tested the tool for ingredient swaps, scaling, and kitchen troubleshooting.
- The AI model was trained on real user comments, offering practical substitution advice.
- The assistant leaves the original recipe intact and generates a separate modified version for the user.
At around 7:00 PM each weeknight, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Senior Reviewer for Smart Home at The Verge, finds herself standing in front of the refrigerator trying to decide on a dinner option that will not prompt her husband to complain about chicken again. While she acknowledges that she should plan her meals in advance, she does not, leading to a nightly battle where chicken usually emerges victorious.
Recently, her primary weapon in this daily struggle has been artificial intelligence. Between Alexa Plus on the Echo smart display in her kitchen, the Samsung Food app on her refrigerator, and an AI-powered cooking robot, AI has transformed into her go-to sous chef. Although it requires close supervision, it has assisted her with ingredient swaps, generating ideas, and fixing cooking mistakes. Naturally, when her preferred recipe app, NYT Cooking, rolled out an AI assistant, she was intrigued.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Many individuals, including recipe purists and NYT Cooking subscribers, have expressed skepticism toward this new tool, which launched exclusively for subscribers on iOS, and she understands why. One of her favorite aspects of NYT Cooking is that it features thousands of recipes sourced from reputable origins such as New York Times archives, restaurants, cookbooks, and food columnists, all tested by real human beings.
Another valuable feature of the service, which she has paid for over several years, is the reader comments section. Here, she has frequently discovered solutions to culinary dilemmas, such as finding substitutions for makrut lime leaves when a recipe calls for an upscale ingredient she lacks in her pantry.
"It doesn’t change the existing recipe; it leaves it as is and creates a new one for you"
The Verge
However, reading through hundreds of comments to find answers at 7:00 PM on a weeknight is rarely practical. This is where she found the NYT Cooking assistant helpful. Trained partly on user comments, it provided practical substitutions and solid cooking guidance for new ingredients during her brief testing period.
Training an AI assistant on historical user comments provides a distinct advantage over generic AI models. Recipe comment sections are often packed with grassroots troubleshooting and real-world trials from home cooks who have already navigated missing ingredients or flawed measurements, bridging the gap between algorithmic theory and kitchen reality.
Source: The Verge
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