Can AI Really Cook? Wrong Question.

What the AI Recipe Debate Gets Wrong About Cooking With AI

Every few weeks a food site runs the same experiment. A writer types a recipe request into a chatbot, or clicks through to one of those recipe generator sites with a suspiciously generic "About Us" page, bakes whatever comes out, and reports back that it was a disaster. Alexandra Foster at The Kitchn just did it with a batch of lemon oatmeal "no-bake" cookies (which required a stove, had nothing holding them together, and looked nothing like the shiny photo), and I'll save you the suspense: they fell apart. And I believe every word of it. I've spent twenty years at BakeSpace.com watching home cooks share recipes they actually made in their actual kitchens, so when someone tells me a recipe nobody ever cooked doesn't work, I'm not exactly reaching for the smelling salts.

The article gets a lot right. Google's AI Overviews stitching one blogger's ingredients onto another blogger's method and slapping a real creator's name on the result (Adam and Joanne Gallagher of Inspired Taste call them Frankenstein recipes, which is perfect) is a genuine problem. Bloggers losing traffic to a summary box that gets their egg yolk count wrong is a genuine problem. Sally McKenney of Sally's Baking Addiction pointing out that AI can't taste or test anything is simply true. If the job of AI in the kitchen were writing recipes, I'd be right there with my pitchfork.

The Test Nobody Runs

What none of these articles ever do is put a purpose-built kitchen assistant to the test. They test AI as a cookbook author, discover it's a lousy one, and call it a day, which is a little like reviewing a GPS by asking it to write a travel memoir. Nobody I know wants a robot to invent their banana bread. That was never the point.

It Started in the Comments

I got the idea for BakeBot on BakeSpace's own Pinterest page, long before anyone was using the word "prompt" outside of a high school writing class. Under our pins, people were asking questions in the comments. Can I use frozen berries? Can I make this the night before? Why did mine come out flat? They weren't asking the home cook who created the recipe, they were asking us, the brand page, as if we were the cook who made it and could pop into their kitchen to walk them through it. With 130,000 recipes from home cooks all over the world, there was no way we could answer them all. That's when it clicked for me that finding the recipe was never the hard part. The hard part is everything that happens BEFORE and AFTER you find it.

More Than Five Stars

When I brought the idea to my developers, they told me not to do it. "People want reviews," they said, give them star ratings. But a five-star rating only tells you that somebody somewhere liked it. It can't tell you whether it will work for your guests, or what to do when your dough looks wrong, or whether you can get away with what's left in the pantry. What AI gives us is so much more than five stars. It gives us insight, help making a decision, access, understanding, and the warmth of someone guiding you through it, like a best friend who really knows how to cook, or your grandma when you need her most.

The Whole Journey

Because cooking isn't a recipe, it's a whole journey, and a recipe only covers one stop on it. There's deciding what to make in the first place. There's figuring out whether it works for the particular people coming to dinner Saturday. There's the 2am baking session when you realize you need to change something on the fly, the moment you mess up and need to fix it, and the moment you open the fridge and there's no butter and no way you're getting to the store. There's standing in the produce aisle trying to figure out whether this melon is going to be any good. No blogger is standing in my kitchen at 2am, no matter how lovely her headnotes are, and the print magazine The Kitchn suggests I go back to has no idea I'm out of butter.

Just Ask

And in those moments I don't want to write a prompt, which is why BakeBot lives in two places. On BakeSpace.com, it sits on every single recipe page, so it already knows what you're making. You just ask your question the way you'd ask a friend standing next to you, and if you need to change something, BakeBot will modify the recipe and let you save your version to your own BakeSpace recipe box. You can also talk to it about the recipe, ask it what an ingredient is and get help now.

As the technology grew up (faster than any of us expected), we gave BakeBot its own home at BakeBot.ai, where it does everything it does on BakeSpace and a whole lot more. It answers any cooking question you throw at it (even with just your voice), automatically calculates the macros for your recipes, pulls in a recipe from a link, a file, or something you paste, searches the BakeSpace community and the web, and uses SmartSwap to find American-made alternatives that keep your grocery bill in check. And when I'm at the grocery store holding a cantaloupe with a cart blocking the aisle behind me, I can open the camera, show BakeBot the melon, and ask if it's ripe. That's a completely different experience than typing into a blank chatbot box, and not one bit of the backlash is about it.

What Counts as Tested?

Then there's the question of what "tested" even means. I push BakeBot hard on substitutions, and one night I pushed it to the limit, making cookies from whatever I had on hand. I loved how they came out. My husband did not, because he was tasting them against the cookies his mom used to make, and in fairness to him, nobody wins that contest, human or machine. But I wasn't there to remake his mother's recipe. I was testing whether someone at home who needs cookies at midnight can actually get there with what's in the pantry. Both of us were judging those cookies honestly, we just weren't running the same test.

Food writers know this better than anyone. A recipe can be tested a dozen times in a professional kitchen and still turn out differently in mine, because my oven runs hot and my flour came from a different store and my family likes things sweeter. Home cooks have been making untested versions of tested recipes forever. Every grandmother who swapped in yogurt because the sour cream ran out was doing it without a single algorithm. The honest job of a kitchen assistant isn't to pretend its swap is the original. It's to tell you what's changing and what to expect, and to keep the original intact. Whether you're on BakeSpace or BakeBot.ai, your modified version gets saved as its own recipe, so your midnight cookies are their own thing and the cook who wrote the recipe still gets to be the cook who wrote the recipe.

The Wrong Target

So I don't think the backlash is wrong. I think it's aimed at the wrong target. Somewhere right now there's a question sitting under a pin that nobody is ever going to answer, and somebody standing in a kitchen at midnight waiting for it. That's who I've been building for since 2006. I'd love for one of these articles to come stand in that kitchen with me (and BakeBot!).