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from the cloudy-with-a-probability-of-meatballs dept.
Steve Abrams, the director of IBM's Watson Life research program, told Quartz that Watson scanned publicly available data sources to build up a vast library of information on recipes, the chemical compounds in food, and common pairings. (For any budding gastronomers out there, Abrams said Wikia was a surprisingly useful source.) Knowledge that might've taken a lifetime for a Michelin-starred chef to attain can now be accessed instantly from your tablet.
The Watson team has actually published a cookbook of its AI-inspired dishes in partnership with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), which launches April 14. While Quartz has not been able to test out Watson's esoteric parings yet, here are some that stood out:
- Belgian bacon pudding, a desert containing dried porcini mushrooms
- Vietnamese apple kebab, with the vaunted mushroom-and-strawberry pairing
- Portuguese lobster roll, with appetizing "saffron fluid gel"
- Hoof-n-Honey ale, with veal stock
- Thai-Jewish chicken, with potato latkes and rice balls
- The shrimp cocktail, which is a beverage with actual shrimp in it
- Kenyan Brussels spouts, with cardamom
It sounds like another sort of molecular gastronomy. Have any Soylentils eaten recipes like that? Does it work?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SlimmPickens on Monday April 13 2015, @10:40PM
I'd be much more interested in the pairing database. I'm after less extreme pairings and the commercial databases are very expensive. They generally work by saying if one popular food has a group of chemicals and another popular food has the same group of chemicals then they might go well together. This is how Heston Blumenthal comes up with the likes of snail porridge (which is one of his best sellers).
For a while there was a free database where I learned several pairings I still use, like eggs and scotch whiskey, or duck meat and cooked banana (with duck gravy etc) but it's gone now. It's not in the wayback machine.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:32AM
I've heard the claim that what you might call advanced pairings have a chemical basis, but I'm somewhat dubious.
Some foods have elements that are a mixture of an extremely diverse collection of molecules. Structures like gluten made up of chopped up proteins are an example. We can characterize types of gluten based on their plant origin, but I doubt there's a clear picture of the molecular distinctions between different glutens.
Second, I doubt we properly understand the mapping between chemical features and taste sensations. In vision, violet is a monochromatic color which is observable due to light in that frequency provoking a certain response on cones with overlapping frequency ranges and purple is an approximation of violet created by blending red and blue light in a way that stimulates the cones in a similar way. I've seen some food pairings that sound like they're based on guesses about "purple" and "violet" tastes.
But I'm not sure those can be distinguished from culturally bound pairings and acquired tastes (which can be motivated by being told that a great chef came up with the pairing).
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:39AM
We don't understand it, but that is how those databases work, and they do work. Not everything they come up with is delicious though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:46AM
Why bother with unsightly databases when you can go cognitive Web 3.0 with the Watson API [ibm.com]?
"Watson, make me a sandwich."
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Tuesday April 14 2015, @06:17AM
Don't know if the food info is in there, but sure looks interesting