AI is a powerful tool with many capabilities, but have you ever thought of having it make you a recipe?
Hello! This is Izzy, the kid foodie, and my do I have the story to share!
For my 17th birthday dinner, I decided to have a home-cooked meal. But this wouldn’t just be any meal, I wanted it to be Michelin Star quality. I had the supplies to make something extravagant and was especially curious to try utilizing my whipping siphon and maybe including some gels.
I began planning my dinner by searching for unique recipes that I had never made before.
I landed on a meal, which would include: beef carpaccio with a homemade anchovy aioli and handmade saffron fettuccini pasta smothered in a creamy roasted garlic and lemon pasta sauce. For my last dish, I wanted something crazy, unlike anything I had ever tasted. That’s when I thought of…ChatGPT. That’s right, I had AI create me a recipe!
I began with what I wanted the recipe to entail. I shared my vision of a Michelin-quality dish. I wanted to use my whipping siphon, and I was especially eager to try making edible pearls. With this request, it created: Beet Tartare with Horseradish Espuma, Dill Oil, Black Garlic Pearls & Crispy Rye Crumbs. Wait what? My first thought was that it mistyped ‘beef tartare’ as “beet tartare”. Then I thought, what in the world is ‘espuma’? This recipe sounded more extravagant than anything I had imagined. However, I would be lying to say that I wasn’t curious how the beet tartare would taste. So, I tried it!
Here’s the ticker: I wasn’t going to tell my family that the recipe was from AI until after they ate it.
The days leading up to my birthday, I began grocery shopping, as I knew that my recipes were calling for some unique ingredients. I went to Safeway and then Whole Foods to acquire all of the ingredients the recipes called for. However, I had to special order black garlic paste (for the black garlic pearls) from Amazon, after not being able to find any at either grocery store.
I’m sure that you’re wondering by now, how did the dinner turn out?
Beef Carpaccio with Anchovy Aioli
The carpaccio was tricky to slice thin, so I resorted to using a mandolin. However, I recommend not doing this, as I quickly noticed that the fillet was becoming deformed by the machine. This left the slices a bit too thick for Michelin quality. The anchovy aioli was good, and I enjoyed using the remaining sauce as a Caesar salad dressing later, throughout the week.
Handmade Pasta (Great! Just typing those words and now I’m hungry.)
I have made homemade pasta in the past and find that my Villaware pasta-making machine works very well for this. Homemade pasta is so much more delicious than store-bought. I highly encourage you to try making it at some point. While recipes often call for the dough to rest overnight, the hands-on process is actually quite simple, mostly entailing feeding the dough through your maker to thin and cut it. The sauce that I made to pair with the fettuccine was pretty good. However, I have found that a very simple sauce is preferable so that the fresh pasta can shine, rather than the sauce overpowering.
Lastly, the Beet Tartare!
Firstly, be careful when handling beets, as their strong pigment can easily stain your clothes, cutting board, and skin. Secondly, oh my, this was delicious. This recipe blew my parents and my expectations away. Each aspect contributed a unique texture, ensuring that my mouth could hop in on the flavor party of my birthday.
The beets were fresh, the (freshly grated) horseradish espuma (culinary foam) was frothy and added a unique texture, and the crispy rye crumbs were so good (don’t tell anybody, but I ate them by the spoonful as an “amuse bouche”). The black garlic pearls had strong potential, but didn’t quite turn out. The process for making them required dropping the black garlic flavored liquid into ice-cold oil, in which its agar agar powder would solidify into droplets. Looking back, I released too many droplets into my small beaker at once, so the pearls began to stick together. This left little room for incoming droplets, causing deformed pearls.
My birthday evening became just the culinary adventure I had hoped for. Even though not every dish turned out perfectly and dinner finished way later than expected, it gave me the experience of trying recipes out of my comfort zone, and I learned so much about these advanced culinary methods. I recommend that next time you have a rainy day or extra time to make dinner, you try something crazy! (P.S. Just make sure to have a yummy snack, like cheese and crackers, to make sure nobody gets hangry while cooking.)
Would you try an AI recipe?
Here are the recipes that I used. Feel free to try them out yourself! Drop a comment if you do, or if you have any unique recipe recommendations to try next.
And I just had ChatGPT write this. Just kidding!
Creamy Roast Garlic and Lemon Pasta Sauce Recipe
Travelicious.blog 