Cooking with AI: ChatGPT as Your Personal Sous-Chef

As AI technology becomes more accessible and user-friendly, people are finding innovative ways to integrate artificial intelligence into their daily lives – including in their kitchens.

AI is being used in cooking to create meal suggestions, recipes, and shopping lists. ChatGPT can create meals in the style of your favorite chef or using specific ingredients in your kitchen. Meal plans can be based on preferences or customized for people with specialty diets.

Both amateur and professional chefs have been experimenting with using ChatGPT as their sous-chef, and the results are intriguing. Let's take a look at how they're doing it.

Dietician and nutritionist, Katie Horrell, from Dark Blue Nutrition, recognizes that one thing many people struggle with daily is simply coming up with meals to cook. Let's face it, half the battle is deciding what to make for dinner every day. Factor in a busy lifestyle and you may end up settling for convenience over health or flavor.

Brainstorming ideas like that is a really good task for ChatGPT. And as Horrell points out – it can be especially helpful for those who have a specialty diet (like vegan, vegetarian, keto, etc.) or are simply trying to eat healthily. So she prompted;

“Tell me some meal ideas for a vegan mom of three.”

ChatGPT gave her a list of about 10 different meal options that a vegan could eat. So she decided to ask for a more organized meal plan that could help plan out each meal for the week;

“Can you make this into a meal plan?”

The output it gave was a week's worth of meals – breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

As a nutritionist, she wanted to push it even a bit further and get a more detailed plan so she asked;

"Make me a Paleo meal plan with 40% carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein.”

Again, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For each day of the week. What a great way to set yourself up for success. Which brings us to her next idea for ChatGPT – a grocery list!

“Make me a grocery list from this meal plan”

Talk about saving time wandering through the aisles of the grocery store. And surely this will help with budgeting too!

Horrell suggests that quick food substitution ideas like “What is a healthy substitute for sugar in [this] recipe, or, what is a high fiber substitute for Tofu?” would also be great things to ask ChatGPT.

Hanna Seariac from Desert News enlisted the help of ChatGPT to create a 4-course meal for her dinner party.

“ChatGPT, I’m having a guest over for dinner. I need ideas for an appetizer, a soup or salad, a dinner, a dessert and nonalcoholic beverages to pair with each dish. I have unlimited access to ingredients.”

Wow, I wonder what ChatGPT will do with unlimited access to ingredients…

It offered up a 4-course meal including bruschetta as the appetizer, a spinach and strawberry salad, grilled salmon with roasted vegetables, and herbed rice dish for the main, and for dessert, a triple chocolate mousse cake!

ChatGPT listed the ingredients, instructions, and even a non-alcoholic beverage idea to pair with each dish.

And remember that with AI, the more detailed the input, the better the output will be so you can be as specific as you want. Fine Dining Lovers shared some other great ways to prompt ChatGPT for delicious recipes:

• “Create a recipe in the style of [famous chef].”

• “Write a recipe in English for a French-style dish using chicken, carrots, potatoes and cream.”

• “Write a recipe using leftover pasta.”

Amateur cook Michael King admits where he has trouble in the kitchen is coming up with ideas to use the ingredients he already has on hand. ChatGPT would probably be great at that.

So he said;

“In all my following prompts I want you to act as my personal chef”

ChatGPT responded: “Understood! I’ll do my best to provide you with the information and recipes you need to cook up some delicious meals. Please let me know what you need help with.”

He continued;

“I’ve got the following ingredients in my pantry: Flour, Milk, tin of crushed tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, sugar, butter, mustard, chicken breast, white bread, parmesan cheese. Provide me some recipes for a dinner meal by using only the ingredients I’ve listed. You don’t need to use all ingredients.”

Based on his list, ChatGPT gave him the option between chicken parmesan, carrot and zucchini fitters, or tomato soup. Except it assumed he had a few eggs on hand. Because of the way the language model was trained, you can easily interact with ChatGPT. So King replied;

“I don’t have eggs”

To which ChatGPT replied “No problem! Here’s an updated recipe …” So King decided;

“I’d like to cook Eggless Carrot and Zucchini Fritters, give me the required ingredients amounts and also a detailed cooking instruction.”

He then asked for dessert!

Recognizing how popular ChatGPT was getting, Stefano Cantù created ChefGPT which is basically the ChatGPT of generating food recipes.

The tool can be used to do just about everything that we’ve seen in the previous use cases of ChatGPT including making meal plans, recipes based on a list of ingredients, and even drink pairings. It’s free for the basic version or $2.99 for the paid version which gives you access to all the different features, the added value here is the user-friendly interface.

The app has gained popularity and users have already begun sharing the recipes they’ve created with ChefGPT on Twitter.

Professional Chef and Youtuber Adam Witt from “Omnivorous Adam” decided to put that to the test with a ChatGPT vs. chef cooking challenge.

The rules: "We each come up with a recipe based off of random ingredients that we determine. Since you don't have hands, I will cook them both. Whoever comes up with the better and tastier recipe wins."

ChatGPT generated the list of ingredients they both had to use, provided a recipe for its part of the competition, and Witt got to cooking.

His friend/cameraman judged the results, and although he ultimately crowned Witt as the winner this time, he admitted that the recipe that ChatGPT came up with was incredibly delicious.

So as we continue to see advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, we will likely see even more applications of this technology in a variety of fields.

It's worth pointing out that this isn't the first instance of AI technology being used for recipe assistance. Many home cooks have already turned to Alexa or Google Assistant for recipe ideas and cooking advice.

But it may have the potential to give some cooking blogs and search engines a run for their money. Considering most recipes on Google's front results page require a ton of scrolling to get down to the recipe, it's not surprising why one would prefer ChatGPT's more direct, interactive, responses.

Interestingly, creating an open-source platform to counter Google is one of the reasons Elon Musk claims OpenAI was created in the first place.