I've had some really good experiences with cocktail recipes and Claude. It's got access to my barcart inventory, general tastes, and general desired level of effort.

I feel like the technique recommendations are probably the most valuable element, but I'm getting rave reviews like 85% of the time now?

There have been a couple times where I was out of an ingredient and it proposed an adjustment that sounded a little wild to me, but it almost always is well received.

You're right, we don't need AI for that, we need a searchable cookbook.

Unfortunately, one does not exist.

The Internet, however, is full of garbage cooking advice, and while AI is quite happy to parrot that garbage, it's not significantly worse than it's sources.

What, you've never owned a cookbook?

The physical ones have indices, and the digital ones usually do as well (plus string search).

I own multiple physical cookbooks.

I often find their contents to be both incredibly broad, and incredibly shallow, and often lead to dishes that don't quite suit my tastes.

I have generally had more success with the internet than I have with them.

I have the same problem with cookbooks

I usually just find recipes that are close to something I like and then modify them until I like them

I feel like cooking recipes should always be full of little notes from past attempts, to tweak them to your personal taste

I do that, but I've found more success with using internet recipes as a starting point. The general-purpose cookbooks are, at best, another data point, or an explanation for something glossed over by other recipes. Ar worst, they kind of suck.

And we aren't talking about something esoteric. How To Cook Everything. (4.5 rating on Amazon, 4.0 on Goodreads), one of the most popular cookbooks in the world...

Has its first recipe for chicken cutlets produce undercooked chicken (15 minutes at 325F has not resulted in 165F internally).

Worse yet, its chile recipe for some weird reason involves boiling and simmering an onion with the beans before throwing it out (WTF). It then has you drain the beans only to add that drained water right back (WTF?), unless you optionally replace it with tap water (WTF was the point of boiling the onion then?), so that you could bring them to boil again. The recipe barely has any spices besides actual chile peppers.

This... Is not good or helpful, but is incredibly opinionated with a bunch of bullshit steps.

Once again, Grandma had it right. The Fanny Farmer or Betty Crocker cookbook with dozens of little papers slipped in it and/or marginal notes everywhere is the way.

I wanted to correct you and bring up my favorite website that had filters for the ingredients you want/don't want to use, type of dish, and time for cooking, but it appears that in a last month it was sold and now it links to the slop site with no useful filtering. I used this site as a quick lookup for recipe ideas for 7 years now.

Fuck. Does nothing good survive on the internet anymore.

If you’re already very experienced at cooking AI recipes are amazing. They cut to the chase and provide a good enough outline without all the preamble

Same here, I’ve been cooking for myself and later also my wife since 2005, even when baking I rarely need exact amounts, for cooking I essentially never follow the recipe directly and adapt them as needed, without ever changing them from the original.

I mostly don’t even need a recipe from AI, just the title and a 1-2 sentence description.

In case you or anyone else in this thread hasn't come across it, https://www.recipesource.com/ is basically the same but curated.

I was going to ask why it’s not the first result in Google but the expired cert and invalid CN explains it.

LLMs for recipes are good if you just want to make a thing, not necessarily the best version of that thing. It's nice being able to ask questions about certain steps as well, or ingredient substitutions if needed. It'll make a nice, average, recipe (unless I suppose you prompt for something). That's perfectly fine for most cooking, and often what you want when you're making a dish for the first time.