At first glance, it might not seem like strawberries and chicken have much in common. But look closer, and you'll find it: the flavor compound g-dodecalactone.
That sciencey-sounding gobbledygook probably doesn't mean much to you, but it means a lot to Chef Watson, IBM's (IBM ) cognitive computer.
That compound is found not only in chicken and strawberries, but in pork, mushrooms and pineapple. (It's also added to sunscreen to give it that tropical smell.)
Ibm's Watson Is Now A Cooking App With Infinite Recipes
Chef Watson understands food on a molecular level, and works off the theory that things that share similar flavor compounds taste good together. That knowledge makes Watson an interesting sidekick for both professional chefs and home cooks.
But Watson isn't just a chef. It's a computer system that learns by reading books, articles, or whatever you feed it. The cognitive system has been put to use in finance, healthcare, engineering and, most famously, on Jeopardy!
But this week, it was all about the food. I sat down for lunch with a few people from Watson's team to sample what a computer can come up with when given free rein in the kitchen.
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The first thing I noticed was that the menu was like a very strange fusion restaurant. There was a Turkish-Korean Caesar salad, Indian turmeric paella and Belgian bacon pudding for dessert.
Chef Watson is going to suggest ingredients I'd never use and that's what's going to be surprising to me, said Florian Pinel, the project's lead engineer.
In other words, Watson is coming at recipes with no preconceived notions of what they should be. It will throw together ingredients with more freedom than us humans, who may not like cooking certain things or using specific ingredients. Plus, its database pulls from cuisines of about 30 countries.
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Users can select recipes with Watson (it's available to the public in beta). They start by giving it some parameters about what ingredients to include and what to exclude. There's also a slider that goes from keep it classic to surprise me.
Chef James Briscione, the Institute of Culinary Education's director of culinary development, prefers surprise me. He worked with Watson on my lunch, which used recipes from a cookbook published last month, Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson.
Watson gets its ideas from a database of 10, 000 Bon Appétit recipes. It uses machine learning, which means the more data it has, the smarter it gets. Through Bon Appétit, it has learned how to build recipes, understand proportions and has seen which ingredients are usually paired together. It has also had to learn little things that humans take for granted -- like that you can shell a lobster but not a salmon.
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Its ability to understand flavor compounds is important because it's something that would take us forever to do. Take a tomato: it has over 400 compounds. Trying to make a dish based on that information would take hours upon hours, according to Briscione. For Watson, it takes seconds.
But the technology is still evolving. It was only last year that regular people were able to start accessing Chef Watson, and there's a reminder on the site that Watson eats data, not real food ... give us feedback to make the Chef smarter.
Since Watson has never seen it used in a recipe, it doesn't know what to do with it, so leaves it on the shelf. (Just like I do.)
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But, Pinel said, it's only a matter of time: Give it one sea urchin and it will start adding it to recipes.It drew on vast databases - one containing existing recipes, another providing data on flavour compounds in thousands of ingredients and a third with psychological data about how humans perceive different flavours.
At the time, IBM said the system demonstrated how computers could be creative, but added that it was also an example of how, in future, humans and machines would work together.
Last year, the firm partnered with Bon Appetit to build a more consumer-friendly app using 9, 000 recipes supplied by the magazine. It released a trial version of the app to some readers.
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We've been impressed by the creative ideas users have discovered so far - to see not only what dishes they were making, but what common food problems they were solving with the help of Watson, said Stacey C Rivera, digital director of Bon Appetit.
From cutting out gluten to limiting the amount of waste in their kitchen, the Chef Watson app proves that if you give cooks a tool to help them be creative in the kitchen, they will be.
Dr Steve Abrams, director of IBM Watson, said: The application of Watson in the culinary arts illustrates how smart machines can help people make discoveries.
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These technologies are being adopted not only by cooking lovers, but professionals in other industries ranging from life sciences to fashion to explore new ideas.
Some of the initial dishes cooked up by Chef Watson were pretty outlandish - such as Baltic Apple pie which included a layer of pork.
Technology news site Engadget has been working its way though the Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson cookbook, which was released a few months ago.
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In May, it was announced that Watson would be used to make decisions about cancer care in 14 hospitals in the US and Canada.
During July's Wimbledon tennis championships - where IBM is the main technology partner - the 3.2 million data points captured will be fed into Watson and new tennis facts will be served up via a human-readable alert, which Wimbledon staff will put out on Facebook and Twitter.
And recently, the talks from all previous TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conferences have been inputted into the machine - allowing users to ask a series of questions based on the topics covered.Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson includes 65 recipes developed with the help of IBM's Watson (Photo: IBM & Institute of Culinary Education)
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Florian Pinel, Senior Technical Staff Member, Watson Life interacts with Chef Michael Laiskonis and Chef James Briscione from the Institute of Culinary Education (Photo: IBM & Institute of Culinary Education)
Florian Pinel, Senior Technical Staff Member, Watson Life interacts with chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education, using Chef Watson to discover new recipe creations (Photo: IBM & Institute of Culinary Education)
Chef Michael Laiskonis and Chef James Briscione from the Institute of Culinary Education preparing a dish based on ingredient combinations from Chef Watson (Photo: IBM & Institute of Culinary Education)
How Ibm's Chef Watson Actually Works
These days, it seems like every celebrity comes out with a cookbook at some point, and IBM's Watson supercomputer is no exception. The newly released Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson includes 65 recipes, developed with the help of what's billed as the world’s first cognitive cooking system, is the result of a three-year collaboration between IBM Research and chefs at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE).
Launched four years ago, Watson can handle extremely large amounts of data as an aid to decision making in medicine, customer service, finance, and other fields. Chef Watson was conceived as a way to illustrate not only what Watson can do, but how it can interact with everyday life. Starting out as a food truck, it went on to become an app, and on Tuesday it became a published author.
IBM says that Cognitive Cooking is not only a compendium of recipes, but also discusses the evolution of Chef Watson. The dishes were produced by Watson's ability to extract facts from millions of pages of literature and draw relationships between them. This allows it to produce a database of recipes, dish types, cooking styles, human psychology, and taste preferences, along with feedback and oversight from chefs and diners, and from that, create new dishes.
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Central to this is the ability of the system to deal with food pairings. This is an offshoot of the chemistry of taste as discovered by molecular gastronomy. Instead of dealing with dishes at an ingredient level, Watson looks at the actual chemicals that control taste and how one food pairs with another. For example, a main taste chemical of tomatoes is shared with strawberries, so it's entirely possible to make bruschetta with strawberries. By analyzing these pairings, Chef Watson came up with things like plum pancetta cider. Other recipes include Spanish Almond Crescent, Creole Shrimp-Lamb Dumplings, Italian-Pumpkin Cheesecake, and Hoof-and-Honey Ale.
David Szondy is a playwright, author and journalist based in Seattle, Washington. A retired field archaeologist and university lecturer, he has a background in the history of science, technology, and medicine with a particular emphasis on aerospace, military, and cybernetic subjects. In addition, he is the author of four award-winning plays, a novel, reviews, and a plethora of scholarly works ranging from industrial archaeology to law. David has worked as a feature writer for many international magazines and has been a feature writer for New Atlas since 2011.
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