[fps-hero]

I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

The flavor bible.

I can assure you that it does not contain 1800 ingredients in all of there combinations, but it does a remarkable job of covering a widely used selection of herbs spices vegetables and meats. I doubt a compressed version of the text would even be very large.

The trouble I find with LLM generated recipes is they miss the nuance of the technique. Often the success of a depends on a single step or ratio. For instance “fried chicken” has a million incarnations the world over, but you can’t just average out the recipes and end up with tasty fried chicken.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Ruhlsman's "Ratio" is also quite good at distilling the mechanics of food into an algorithm of sorts.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman...

[mncharity]

Preview[1] available on Google Books.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ratio/yXwYoXmYTD4C

[theodorewiles]

yeah I took a look at this and others and tried to pull together some helpful 'flavor maps':

https://transcendent-choux-d1b930.netlify.app/

[parkersweb]

Have you also come across this? ‘Flavor network and the principles of food pairing’

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.6074

[theodorewiles]

I haven't but looks cool!

[wampwampwhat]

do you have a key for the color meanings?

[jona-f]

Obviously the llm has no idea how the recipe will taste. You will have to cook it many times yourself to really understand a dish. A good cookbook sets you up right away with a tasty start, but doesn't give you experience. A good cook has so much experience that they can actually out-of-domain predict a recipe from the taste, but an llm can't do that, cause it fundamentally has no idea how things taste to humans. They are a great starting point for recipes though and I'd argue they don't give you the average of all recipes, cause you can specify quite detailed which "authentic" version you want and the models generally to a decent job.

[simulator5g]

Besides that, taste is only a small part of the experience of eating something. You can't use an algorithm to cook good food if it has no reference to smell, texture, appearance, psychology, nutrition, culture, etc. You don't even really decide what to eat unless you put effort into the decision, your gut mostly drives you around via the vagus nerve. So a good recipe needs to appeal to your gut perhaps more than it appeals to you.

[stuaxo]

Sounds like the flavour theaurus

[blitzar]

Sounds like the flavour colour wheel.

[xp84]

Sounds like the flavour roulette wheel.

[ian_j_butler]

This is exactly like when Skippy is trying to work out the flavor profiles for the kinds of mush that monkeys will find most appealing. Yes, we know that "chocolate peanut butter bananas" is the true king of flavor latent space, but even a slight error in floating point precision could stick you with "cantor's peach butt nut abalone".

[ZeWaka]

Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients.

[JadeNB]

> Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients.

I think fpshero says exactly that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294459):

> I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

> The flavor bible.

[ZeWaka]

oh god I swear it said something different when I posted, or maybe I had too many cups of coffee yesterday...

[com2kid]

> The trouble I find with LLM generated recipes is they miss the nuance of the technique. Often the success of a depends on a single step or ratio. For instance “fried chicken” has a million incarnations the world over, but you can’t just average out the recipes and end up with tasty fried chicken.

Specify what technique you want. Explicitly say you want to correctly follow all the techniques of the chosen cuisine.

All the LLMs have ingested nearly every cookbook ever made, across multiple languages.

You can upload a photo of your spice rack (with visible labels) to ChatGPT and tell it to save your pantry ingredients as a memory.

LLMs are absurdly overpowered for cooking, when used right. If you ask it for a week long meal prep plan the results will be meh, but ask it for kheer inspired rice crispy treats (which everyone reading this should to, kheer rice crispies are the best!) and you'll get some solid results.

You may notice at first the LLM will still water things down for "American" tastes. With Claude/ChatGPT you only need to remind it once or twice not to do that and it'll course correct all future conversations.

[dns_snek]

> All the LLMs have ingested nearly every cookbook ever made, across multiple languages.

That's not a positive thing, good recipe developers are Rare. For every recipe that's been meticulously tested and documented there are 1000 that haven't been. Many cookbooks are riddled with errors.

[com2kid]

Sure, but most recipe books are just copies of other good recipe books. There are only so many ways to bake cookies.

I've always been a pretty good cook, but I've been able to pull off some really cool stuff with the help of ChatGPT lately. It is probably just an incremental lift, and I still catch it making errors from time to time, but it has been a huge help in the kitchen.

[MengerSponge]

Come on now how bad could it be? Wisdom of crowds and all that...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o

Oh. Oh no.

[hansvm]

Being able to wade through the bullshit is a valuable skill, and the worse your cooking is the less valuable an LLM will be. That said, prompting matters. Something like the following, chased with any necessary questions to ground the details at your skill level, is likely to get you an above-average result. Better cooking skills allow you to ask better follow-on questions, or (context windows matter) create new sessions probing other things you care about.

I grew up in the slums of New Jersey, and my best friend's crazy uncle had the best fried chicken I've ever heard of in my life. I've eaten the best $10k omakase you can find and other amazing food the world over, and I can't even begin to describe what sets his chicken apart from literally every other food. How did he work that magic? You've been accoladed for your work uncovering the best, most unique flavors our civilization has to offer. Can you recreate that trip to heaven?

Some generic follow-on questions (in line with the trope of "now make it better") include:

1. That's all well and good, but I'm an experienced chef, and I know all of those elementary basics. Something is still missing. What made that meal the best in the world?

2. Pick something the LLM said, and focus on that as if it successfully caught on to an important detail (e.g., in-context, IME you'd want to latch on to anything the LLM offered regarding buttermilk or fermentation).

3. Take whatever you learned and start the fuck over. Use another context window to brainstorm a different, more appropriate persona if you can't come up with one on your own (the choice of New Jersey wasn't especially important -- just a concrete detail likely to elucidate ideas you won't see otherwise), and ask again in another session with a better persona and incorporating whatever you've learned and any inspiration you've taken.

4. The initial question was a little open-ended. Ask the LLM to expand its results into 2-3 concrete, orthogonal directions capable of generating those experiences, fleshing out the details into full recipes.

5. I'm sure the secret wasn't just the chicken. Drinks, sauces, music, and everything else played into it. How did he make that feel alive?

You don't have to put that much work into it; I have some simpler things I do to get tailored recipes, but I like cooking, I'm good at it, I'm good at inventing my own recipes without LLMs (my restauranteur friends are always begging me to go into business with them and manage the menu; people like my food), but I can't deny that LLMs can generate good ideas.

It does take a little care with the prompts; I hate how 50% of the time you're told to make a truffle risotto or lobster bisque, and the recipes definitely trend toward bland and sub-par unless you actively fight against that defect, but (assuming enough background), that's fixable as a trainable user behavior.

[yuppiemephisto]

Where did you have 10k omakase?

[hansvm]

I didn't.

[IAmBroom]

You: "I've eaten the best $10k omakase you can find"

yuppiemephisto: "Where did you have 10k omakase?"

You: "I didn't."

The only truth I can derive is that you lied.

[hansvm]

Elaborating on my last comment, I didn't. Kusakabe is great though if you want something comparatively cheaper.

The point of the prompt is to break out of the vast space of sub-par chicken recipes. Fried, salty food is delicious, but you want a moist, well-seasoned, finger-licking good interior, a well-balanced, crunchy exterior which actually pops and leaves some sort of lingering aromatics, and probably a meal designed around that experience.

Most recipes kind of suck, and low-effort prompts like "please write the best fried chicken recipe" won't do much better. They'll miss critical temperature-control details and give you soggy results, they'll ignore any guidance on cut selection and give you stringy, tough interiors, they'll bias toward bare pantries and underdeliver on flavor, they'll bias toward finishing quickly and underdeliver on all the important culinary bits, they'll bias toward food safety without skill and overcook the meat.

Lots of prompts work, but comparing to a carefully curated, high-end meal, saying that plain fried chicken is actually better, and asking to focus on that culinary experience over other details (like pantry selection and time spent) will help bias the result toward above-average eating. Will you experience transcendence from an LLM chicken recipe? Very likely not. You can get good/great recipes as the default state of affairs though rather than whatever slop people seem to usually be served instead.

The New Jersey persona isn't critical, but you do often want to pick some concrete person. Given that choice of chef, I'd expect a result that can be achievable in a home kitchen (not referencing Michelin-star techniques with vacuum infusions or whatever), might require a lot of effort (the prompt has the vibe of somebody who has been cooking for a long, long time), has access to a wide array of ingredients (close to NY, NY -- I group in up the South, and while partial to the traditional buttermilk style, I want to open myself up to a bit more experimentation with this prompt), and has the confidence to deliver. Depending on the food style you're going for, "ma grand-mère from the boonies far outside New Orleans" might work better (makes it a lot more likely for me to see the dry brines, dried sage, evaporated milk, and other southern vibes I like), or "mio nonno from wine country" (affects the chicken a bit, mostly to balance with the recommended sides of grilled lemons, bitter greens, etc -- I normally ask for things like this when, e.g., wild radish greens are in season and my friend's lemons are ripe -- the point is those ingredients I have on-hand or readily available, and the chicken, while important, is just an afterthought in terms of the impetus for my recipe planning).

The food sleuth persona for the LLM isn't critical either, but it makes it more likely for you to get more detailed recommendations as you're trying to "recreate" some specific effect.

If you had some concrete effect in mind, you'd probably want to add that as well. I left it a bit open-ended.

Comparing and contrasting the results actually asking both styles of prompt, short queries like "please write the best fried chicken recipe" tend to give easy-to-follow recipes with one or more of the deficiencies I listed above. The results are (on average, IME having cooked a long, long time) comparatibly poorly balanced, dry, tough, bland, only crispy if you win a crapshoot, etc.

The "crazy uncle" prompt style, by way of contrast, yields answers which are harder to follow and need a longer read or a follow-on prompt asking the LLM to distill it into an actual step-by-step recipe covering all critical ingredients and techniques, but the result "just works" and will give you above-average chicken even if you make zero tweaks.

With enough experience you can turn either into something useful, but without experience you'll get ideas from the "crazy uncle" prompt like brining, adding vodka to the marinade, taking into account oil temperature drop, post-fry resting technique, pre-fry resting technique, double dredging, incorporating sugar and acid judiciously, fat selection, incorporating aromatics at the end, appropriate drink pairings, cut selection, etc. It's just...better. You can later look up any of those things and see why they matter. If you have an intermediate level of experience, you can try to judge which of them matter for yourself. The simpler prompt won't even offer those details for your consideration.