I’m really bad at eating bananas. Let me explain.
I’ll buy a bunch with the best of intentions, set them on my counter, where they’re highly visible, and then proceed to ignore them until they turn an unappetizing brown. It’s a wasteful, shameful habit, and you might have your own guilty version, only with cucumbers or tomatoes or spinach.
It’s not that I don’t like bananas---I do!---it’s just that I lack the inspiration to eat them. Beyond the standard peel-and-consume or banana bread, I’m not sure how to get rid of them. But it turns out, there’s a world full of culinary options in which I can use them---just ask Chef Watson. I did, and the computer (yes, Chef Watson is a computer) presented me with a list of options I would’ve never thought of---banana martinis, banana fricassee, banana fettuccini---while explaining which flavors work well with the tropical fruit.
My computerized sous chef is the result of a collaborative app between IBM and Bon Appetit. Today, they just released the public version of Chef Watson with Bon Appetit, an app that’s designed to help home cooks come up with creative and unexpected ways to combine ingredients.
Watson is IBM’s cognitive computer (of Jeopardy fame), and for the last year it’s been gobbling up information about the art of cooking and harnessing its natural language-processing skills to unearth patterns and insights about how certain foods work together. The computer analyzed the content of more than 9,000 Bon Appetit recipes, gleaning information about cooking patterns and terminology from those concoctions. By combining this data with its robust knowledge of food chemistry and human taste preferences, Watson was able to come up with totally new recipes that use totally new combinations of ingredients. (Bon Appetit is owned by Conde Nast, WIRED's parent company.)
Chef Watson isn't the prettiest app out there, but its functionality overrides any UI shortcomings. It's simple to use: You start by inputting up to four ingredients that you want in the dish, and from there, you have the option to refine your request. The app allows you to choose the style of food you want (African, Italian, comfort) and avoid any ingredients based on dietary restrictions and preferences. Watson is able to process these parameters in real time and churn out suggested recipes based on its wealth of data. Watson will tell you how much of each ingredient to use and give you a basic understanding of how to prepare the dish. “It’s not perfect,” says Watson Group Director Steve Abrams. “It doesn’t know every chemical reaction when you cook, so there’s definitely a role to be played by the human being.”
Creativity in its various forms is an exercise in changing the way you think about things---Watson’s main strength is its ability to form associations that at first glance seem unlikely. Bon Appetit's digital director Stacey Rivera recalls a time when Watson suggested that the magazine’s food editor make a punch with nuts in it. “Dawn was like, 'I can’t put nuts in a punch, people will choke,'” she says. A few weeks later, Rivera and the same food editor were ordering drinks at a restaurant when they came across a drink with a walnut syrup. Whole nuts in a punch? Maybe not a great idea. But nut syrup? That’s actually on trend.
“The thing that Watson does is force us to think outside of what we think things mean in terms of food,” Rivera says. “It challenges us to not be so specific about what nuts mean.”
