When AI makes recipes

Artificial intelligence has been used to solve intractable mathematical problems, create eerie deep-fake videos, and make dancing robots. Now we can add recipe developer to the long list of AI achievements, thanks to Google.

Researchers at Google Cloud, inspired by the surge in baking searches during the pandemic, “decided to dive a little deeper into the trend and try to understand the science behind what makes cookies crunchy, cake spongy and bread fluffy,” according to a post on their blog. The team fed hundreds of recipes for bread, cookies, and cakes into its tool called “AutoML Tables” to let it determine what aspects of each recipe contributed to which of the three categories the recipe belonged.

After inputting all of the data, the researchers asked the tool to develop recipes that straddled the line between the categories – in essence, to make recipes that were 50% each cake or cookie or bread. After the machine crunched the numbers, it came up with two ‘new’ concepts: a Cakie, which is said to have “the cakiness of cake and crispiness of a cookie,” and a Breakie, which is billed as “a fluffy bread/cookie hybrid boasting the texture of a muffin.” The recipes are available in the article so if you are brave, you can try one or both of them.