I am not a natural cook. But in the last year, I’ve been using LLMs to help figure out recipes with more stuff in season, on sale or any combination of things I’m trying to get rid of. It’s also been fairly good at “I liked this, what are similar dishes?” It’s really helped me eat more local and vegetarian foods and be willing to grab whatever is on sale at the grocery store as I know I’ll be able to make something out of it.
Tips etc so far:
I usually ask for three recipes with whatever constraints (vegetables in season here on this date, using a cup of cream etc), just a name and brief description for each. Repeat, varying as necessary.
Once I have something that appeals, I’ll ask for three or four different recipes for that dish of increasing complexity and select as appropriate.
I don’t quite trust the LLMs with cooking times so I’m pretty careful to check w a meat thermometer.
Any thoughts, suggestions etc?
In my experience, LLMs tend to be pretty good as long as you know the topic well and are capable of judging the quality of its output. They will always spit out a mix of good data with trash. So if you’re set on using an LLM for this, you’ll either need to learn to cook without a recipe or accept whatever level of trash you might get from it.
For things like cook time, it’s never going to be exactly right regardless of whether you get the numbers from an LLM or from a reputable cookbook. Things will vary depending on the temperature of your stovetop, size of the cut, freshness of the ingredients, the atmospheric pressure, etc. The only way to get this right is practice.
Otherwise, if this is working out for you, then I see no reason to change anything. If you have specific problems though, we might be able to give some more helpful tips.