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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. |