The NYT Cooking app has introduced a new artificial intelligence assistant designed to help subscribers customize recipes directly on iOS devices at launch. While recipe purists and some users have expressed skepticism, testing the tool reveals it can offer practical ingredient substitutions and reliable cooking guidance by drawing on user comments and professional archives.
Testing the AI on Weeknight Dinners
When facing a weeknight dinner dilemma without proper ingredients, the assistant provides a text box on the recipe page with a prompt to customize the recipe. For example, asking to adapt a One-Pot Chicken and Rice with Ginger using chicken tenders, green beans, and red onions instead of chard, scallions, and cilantro generated a modified version titled One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Ginger and Green Beans within seconds. The tool suggested adjusted cooking times and even approved adding Thai basil after checking flavor impacts. According to The Verge, the resulting dish matched the original cooking time and was successful.
Beyond chicken dishes, the assistant handles measurement conversions from metric to US standards and suggests alternative ingredients, such as grated lime zest for makrut lime leaves while warning about flavor differences. It also prevents incompatible requests, correctly rejecting the idea of using minced beef in a sweet dessert trifle.
Comparing With Voice Assistants and Baking Challenges
When compared to Amazon’s Alexa Plus voice assistant on an Echo Show 11, the NYT Cooking app proved more reliable for displaying modified recipes, though Alexa offered similar substitution advice through shared recipes. However, the cooking app lacks hands-free voice control navigation.
Baking tests presented a bigger challenge when a Cinnamon Roll Bundt Cake was converted into a half-batch of 12 muffins. While the AI successfully recalculated quantities, such as reducing five eggs to three, confusion arose when switching between the original recipe and the AI version in the app. Asking for ingredient quantities via voice typing without deleting the previous version led the assistant to provide the modified butter amount instead of the original, which could have ruined the cake.
While the assistant acts as a helpful sous chef that saves trips to the store, users still need to double-check amounts and cooking times against the original instructions to avoid errors. Purists can easily scroll past the chat box if they prefer to ignore the feature.
