WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about AI-generated recipes! - podcast episode cover

WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about AI-generated recipes!

Jun 30, 202532 minSeason 4Ep. 86
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Episode description

No doubt, the internet is being flooded with AI recipes. In fact, even unscrupulous publishing is being flooded by these generated recipes as small, independent publishers pop up who take advantage of the "free" content to package it as a book.

But there's some hope. AI recipes aren't all bad. And there are ways to identify them before you caught in the trap of making, oh, lemon meringue trout pie.

We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, veteran cookbook authors who've written over three dozen cookbooks and who've been around the block several times already with AI content. We'll tell you how to spot an AI recipe, how to use AI to help in the kitchen, and what the dangers of AI recipes are.

We've also got a one-minute cooking tip about a handy kitchen appliance. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[01:05] Our one-minute cooking tip: use a stick blender!

[03:11] How to spot, use, and stay away from AI-generated recipes.

[29:01] What’s making us happy in food this week: curried chili crisp and potato salad!

Transcript

Intro / Opening

mark

Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Martin. And I'm Marks Scarborough. And together with Bruce, my husband, we have written 37 cookbooks, including Cold Canning, a book that is all about making small batches of preserved and fermented foods, and even laurs like Triple Sec and even dessert sauces like strawberry ice cream topping, small batches, two or three jars that you could put in the fridge or the freezer. No pressure or steam.

Canner needed for anything, even the fantastic Strawberry Preserves and the Blackberry Cham in the book. That's our latest cookbook, but this is our podcast about our passion, food and cooking. We've got, as always, a one minute cooking tip. We're gonna talk all about. AI generated recipes. Maybe we won't cover everything you need to know about them. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But we're gonna talk about what we think about the coming deluge of AI generated recipes. Oh, I know.

And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one-minute cooking tip: use a stick blender!

Bruce

Our one minute cooking tip. You need to get yourself an immersion blender sometimes called a stick blender. I think

mark

it's like a stick blender in the uk, right? Mm-hmm. And an immersion blender in the US mostly. Oh, it's

Bruce

such a

mark

great

Bruce

tool. These are just such great tools. Imagine a rolling pin that has a button on the top where you hold it, and at the bottom there's a blade. They can cut

mark

you to death. They can slice

Bruce

you

mark

off.

Bruce

No, the blade is encased, right? It's. Was for safety, and when you push the button, it spins so convenient. If you are pureing a soup, you could put the stick blender right in your pot of soup, hit the button and puree that carrot soup or that bean soup right in the pot. Sometimes if I'm making jams and it's a little too chunky, I could put it in and just give it one or two clicks and it pulverizes the fruit to just the right consistency. Right. Of course, we're making mayonnaise.

It's just you can't beat it. Right. And it's a very. Handy tool. And

mark

it's also an easy way to make smoothies, right? Because if you wanna drink out of, not a glass container, but a plastic container that you make the smoothie in, you can put the ingredients in there, stick a stick blender in the bottom of it. And it actually is easier cleanup, I think, than a giant blender. It's so easy because, and all of its pieces, the giant blender has so many pieces that need to get cleaned up.

Bruce

Yeah, the stick blender, you just. Unscrew the blade part and put it in the dishwasher. Right. That's how easy it is. Right, right. And usually they come with very long cords so you can reach your stove and your pot no matter where your plugs are. They're really a great

mark

tool. Yeah, it is a great way to take your cooking over the top. Okay, before we turn on to AI generated recipes or turn off onto AI generators. Piece, we wanna tell you that we appreciate your support at this podcast. It would be great if you could rate it and if you could even write a review of it that would be spectacular on the social media platforms that you find this on. Let's say you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Give it a rating and if you can't even stop and drop a review, even a short review, like great podcast, that really helps us because we prefer to remain unsupported and will in fact remain unsupported because we don't want. To be beholden to any corporate overlords.

How to spot, use, and stay away from AI-generated recipes.

So I wanna say what we wanna say, which is what we're about to do about AI generated recipes. So let's start talking about that.

Bruce

Okay. I wanna start with the basic question. What. Is an AI generated recipe?

mark

Well, an AI generated recipe is what you think. It is a recipe that has been generated by artificial intelligence. It is essentially, let's say, fed into chat, GPT or any of the giant AI creators, and a recipe is spit out for, I don't know. Chicken thigh saute.

These recipes are made because the technology that is underpinning the AI has combed the internet, has gleaned all of the recipes out there for chicken thighs that are sitting out on the internet and has, uh, taught, that's such a big word. Mm-hmm. But taught itself things about chicken thigh sautes based on the thousands, millions of recipes that it can find online as it. Combs through all the searches.

Bruce

But let me ask this about AI generated recipes. AI has no taste buds, no AI has no idea of what things taste like. No. So AI is not using any sort of human sense of what tastes good. Well, to create these

mark

secondhand. Here's the secondhand part. It's very unlikely that you're gonna find an AI generated recipe that uses, say. A cup of dried thyme. That's because having combed through millions of recipes through searches, the AI has discovered that most recipes use a teaspoon, a half a teaspoon, a teaspoon and a half of dried thyme. And so it is now believing, I know that's a personal human word. Mm-hmm. Believing, but it is.

It is using, its algorithmically generated, and in fact its artificial intelligence generated knowledge to know that basically when you use dried time, you use about a teaspoon of it. So that's what it's going to do. You're right, in terms of the fact that a teaspoon of dried time may not actually balance out what's in the pod. Mm-hmm. But it is learning it. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna talk about why AI generated recipes are dangerous.

We're gonna talk about how you can spot AI generated recipes on the internet. But then we also, we don't wanna be totally negative, so we wanna talk about what's good about AI generated recipes and there are good things to say about them. It is the coming wave, no matter what else we think. So let's talk about. The problems, and let's talk about how to notice and be smart about recipes you find online. But let's also talk about what can be good about this.

So let's start out why they're dangerous. Okay. I can tell you, I'll start out. Okay. One of the ways that they're dangerous is that since AI is combing through not only the internet, but books, since books are being fed into AI generators too, and the content is being scanned, the. Cooking times the doneness levels. How things are measured as cooked or done is widely varied because there are a lot of idiots online who think a cake can be baked in 10 minutes.

There are a lot of people who think that a pork roast is done in 20 minutes. Remember that Barbara

Bruce

Kaka book roasting from the eighties? I do, and her idea was you take a chicken, you put it in a 500. 50 degree oven for seven minutes,

mark

right? It wasn't seven, but it was 20 and it was insane because almost everything in that book was raw. That book won a million awards. So just say, but nothing worked. Just, yeah. So just say this problem of weird recipe doneness and cooking times and cooking weighs it. It's been, it's been what? Endemic, it's been a problem in our industry for a long time. But again, the. AI's just slurping all of this up.

So it's gonna come out with, you know, I don't know that you can do a bone in chicken breast in perhaps 11 minutes on a grill, which is not

Bruce

possible. Which is really weird because online there does exist the USDA guidelines, right? And international guidelines of what temperatures meet needs to be cooked at how long it needs to be held at that temperature to be safe to eat. And you would think that these ais. Would be trained to look for that information as well.

mark

You mean programmed? Yeah. Um, not trained. It's not a dog. Right. Um, you mean programmed because that would take care of that problem, wouldn't it? This is the problem with AI generation right now is that all information is value flat. So it's going across, it's scanning across not only your USD guidelines, but dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of websites and books and recipes, and it's treating. All that information as if it was all value flat.

Mm. So it's all exactly of the same weight. And when it does that, it looks across it and it says, oh look, the majority of, I'm gonna go back to my chicken breast recipe. The majority of chicken breasts on the grill online get cooked between, I don't know, 12 and 15 minutes. So therefore, mm-hmm. That must. Be the appropriate cooking time for a chicken breast. The problem is chicken bony and chicken breast can run anywhere from what, half a pound to over a pound, right?

Bruce

And it should be cooked to 165 degrees as all poultry should, according to the USDA, and that is rarely taken into consideration by ai. It doesn't look at those kind of safety numbers, so you're missing. Those safety protocols.

mark

Yes, you are. And you're also missing basic safety protocol techniques like we write in our recipes. So let me just say like about cold canning, we made sure that in every recipe in cold canning it, it specifically says to ladle the blackberry jam or the blueberry chutney or the barbecue sauce into clean.

Jars. That's a safety protocol we've put into the recipe and we explain in the introduction, you can run your jars through a hot cycle, a dishwasher, you can run them in hot water, you can boil them on the stove if you want to get really crazy, but you can do all of this to clean the jars. That's a safety protocol that a writer has written into a recipe, and AI probably doesn't see that as a safety protocol.

Bruce

No, and that's the nice thing about a book. Is you're gonna have an introduction to the book. You're gonna have an introduction to each chapter, and you're gonna have a head note, which all adds up together to give you an understanding of what needs to happen in that recipe, both to make it delicious, successful, and also to make it safe.

mark

Right? And let, let. There's also the problem with AI that there is often poor ingredient handling. For example, uh, I found several as I was researching the, for this episode, I found several recipes online, clearly AI generated, where it talked about just chopping up scallions. Well, first of all, you don't. Chop scallions, you slice them.

And secondly, any good recipe would tell you to cut off the wagley roots at the end of it and cut off any squishy green parts at the top, and maybe say the white only or the green part. Only, but it doesn't know any of that. Mm-hmm. No, again, no is such a human word. It doesn't recognize any of that. And so it just says, chop up the scallion. Well, you might say, I know to take the roots off scallions, but a lot of people might not know that. Oh

Bruce

my goodness. No. Let's go back to that famed thing where we have to put drain the pasta in a colander set in the sink. Yeah. And you think that that is, duh. We have to put that in our books because people don't know.

mark

Yes, that's right. There are actually readers who say, I drained the pasta on my counter and the water went all over the kitchen. And I know you think, my gosh, are you crazy? But in fact, it's the truth and not to make fun of those people. Because if you don't know how to cook, you don't know how to cook. Exactly. You don't know what

Bruce

to do. No. If you never baked a cake and it says butter a cake pan, how do you know you're only supposed to butter the inside? If you never bake the cake, how would you know that's another, so now we say. Grease or butter the

mark

inside of a pan. That's another infamous one that actually happened to us early in our career that we had someone write in and say they grease the pan and then it slipped out of their hands because it was so greasy and it was like, oh my gosh, I didn't say grease the inside of the pan. So this person clearly greased the whole pan. But again, not to make fun of this person because if you don't know, you don't know. If you don't know, it's not like cooking is intuitive.

Okay, so let's, let's move on and talk about how do you spot an AI recipe because they are now. Absolutely everywhere across the internet space, my Facebook feed is filled with them. And I want to give you some, um, ways that I've researched this and thought about this. I spent the last few days looking through all those recipes and uh, I can tell you how I spotted the ones that are ai.

And the first I can tell you is that there are unusual ingredient combinations, things that you would never do. Mm-hmm. I actually found a recipe for a raspberry shrimp. Stir fry.

Bruce

Okay. Now while that sounds pretty gross, uh, disgusting, I do need to say that unusual ingredient combinations are kind of what I get paid to come up with Yes. In my career. That's right. So it is an interesting dilemma. Here we are. Here. I am a trained chef. And I am the chef in our duo. And when it comes to creating the recipes that Mark and I talk about for our books, I have to come up with really interesting and unusual flavor combinations.

I don't think I would put raspberries and shrimp together, but I might, no, it's the stir fry part, but I might do a, I can

mark

actually imagine raspberries and shrimp, I guess, but. But IS are shrimp in a stir

Bruce

fry. Yeah, well, like orange and shrimp in a stir fry work. Then why wouldn't an AI think any fruit is gonna work? Of course it would. So it, it's taking its cues from people like us who create recipes, but it has no finesse.

mark

It's true. And this isn't the only way to recognize AI generator recipes. It's one of what we're gonna say. Alright. Eight ways to recognize them. So you mean to look out for really strange combinations of things that you think, wait, there's no shrimp and a chocolate cake? Or we,

Bruce

I'm thinking, no, you're

mark

right. No, there is not. No, there is not. Or I don't know. There's no. Baking powder flavored muffins, those do not exist or should not exist. So again, unusual ingredient combinations is typical and also nonsensical ingredients. I actually found a recipe online for, hey. Pudding And I don't, and this didn't even talk about, I mean, maybe this is a thing that, that, you know, I don't know.

In the middle ages, people made some kind of egg pudding out of hay, but this didn't include any instructions on cleaning hay or what you would need to know about hay. It's just like taking your yard clippings and making a pudding out of

Bruce

it. That's an interesting example 'cause a few years ago we went. Through some Nordic cookbook that passed our desk and in it was a recipe for hay ice cream, and this chef had taken some hay, I don't know if it was cleaned or whatever, and infused it into warm cream to get that hay flavor into the cream, then strained it and used that cream to make ice cream.

All the AI needs is to see that once which is real, and start saying, oh, we can make hay pudding, we can make, you know, hay, anything hay bread, and it doesn't make sense. It made sense for that one chef. But that was it.

mark

Yeah. I, I think that, again, you can find counter examples to all of these, but I think the point is to really watch out for nonsensical things. Mm-hmm. In the ingredients. And also I found a recipe in for, on online and doing research for this podcast that was for lentil bread. Okay, great. You know, I mean, it is a thing. Sure. You can make it with lentil flour. I'm sure you could make bread with cooked lentils and, oh God, that sounds

Bruce

really good. Actually, I'm,

mark

I'm sure that's a. Thing. However, the, the photo for the recipe was a slice of what looked like White Wonder bread. Mm-hmm. It was white US sandwich bread. That recipe photo does not match. Mm-hmm. What the recipe promises. So this is an immediate flag that this is an. AI recipe. And may I say also in this case, with the lentil bread, there was no instruction of cooking it. You heated your oven, but it never said to put it in the oven. You just mix the batter and pour it into a pan.

And then it said cool for five minutes. Mm-hmm. So what does that mean? Right? Yeah. No, that, that's clearly an AI generated recipe. But again, the picture didn't match the recipe at all. And. That that's a problem in Codebooks too, but it is. You should really watch it out for it online.

Bruce

It's a big problem in bloggers and websites, which now I'm thinking maybe all these years that we've seen pictures that don't match. It was the beginning of AI and people just trying to fake you out. Yeah.

mark

Yeah. I also think that it's part of the overall. Fake out that occurs in the food industry. I mean, Bruce and I fought this forever when we were writing all our instant pop books, because of course there are a lot of very popular instant pop books and I'm not gonna name any of the big ones right now. Ours.

Bruce

Instant Pop Bible. Well, yes,

mark

of course. Yes, we did really. Well with the instant Bible, but there were some that sold in the millions of copies and they would always pull, I don't know, filet mignons outta the Instant Pot. And they were perfectly browned. And I'm sorry, you cannot pressure cook something to brown. You just cannot

Bruce

prime ribs. That came out like as if I'd had them in the oven at 3 75 for four hours, right? They were beautiful. No. Mm-hmm. Doesn't work. No,

mark

it doesn't work. Okay. So another way is vague or missing measurements. AI is not good. Yeah, it might become good in the future, but it's not good yet at recognizing accuracy in ingredient measurements. So it's gonna use terms like sum or a bit of, and I know you're gonna say this is the way people cook. They throw sum of or a bit of, but when you have, it's a pinch

Bruce

of, and that,

mark

right. But when you have an ingredient amount. In the ingredient list, one teaspoon dry time, and then it says, use a bit of the time.

Bruce

No. Use the time that, that makes no sense. No use the time,

mark

right. What do I do with the rest of it then? Okay, so watch out for those vague and missing measurements. The

Bruce

other thing is I often find in AI developed recipes that the cooking instructions are just overly simplistic, right? They are. There's no finesse and there's no detail. It'll say cook it until done. What does that mean? Right? What does that mean for a bread? What does that mean for a muffin? What does that mean for a burger? What does that mean for a steak? What does that mean for a chicken? What does that mean for a pudding?

Each one of those things has a different way to tell whether it's done, whether the toothpick is clean, whether the meat's at 140 degrees. Yep. Whether the pudding is set or still jiggly. There are no details like that in so many AI generated recipes.

mark

So we've given you five ways. We're gonna go into six, but lemme just review. So unusual ingredient combinations, nonsensical ingredients, photos that don't match the recipe. Vague or missing measurements. Overly simplistic instructions. And then here's a sixth one. And that is, um, related to me the writer in our team, which is unusual formatting regularities. Lemme explain what I mean by that. That is when you look at the recipe.

Every single paragraph of the method of how you make this thing is exactly the same length. So the generator is in, in a sense, creating paragraphs that look alike. Nobody's recipe actually always has the same length of each step, and you'll also notice in a lot of AI generated recipes that the sentence structure is. Invariable it's subject verb objects, you know, put the time in the bowl, put the flower in the bowl. It's, it's absolutely mechanical.

And every single sentence seems exactly like every other sentence. This is a way you know that it has been unusually formatted. And it could be an AI recipe, I suppose there are people who write like that. Well,

Bruce

they're not gonna sell many books then.

mark

Well, and, but this is when. Specifically talking about the internet, right? Yep. So I suppose there are bloggers who write like that, who never got beyond fifth grade English, but most people vary the length of their paragraphs and they alter the structure of their sentences because it just gets so boring to read the same sentence over and over and over again. Same sentence format.

Bruce

And that leads into the next thing, which is unlikely or non-existent authors. Mark just said, if you have something that seems very mechanical, it probably wasn't written by a person, right? So an AI recipe may be attributed to a blog or even a cookbook, but chances are that's a fake author. They're fake author bios, fake author photos. Yep. You know, look for red flags that are like a food blog being described as a cookbook. Which what? That makes no sense, right.

You know, with a list of recipe titles in the bio or there's a lack of verifiable online presence or social media accounts for that

mark

author. Okay. I can give an example for this that is actually from our life right now. Bruce made a dessert for a dinner party, uh, just last night as we're recording this and it's a dessert. Chinese dessert where you make from scratch a very, very soft tofu, which you did, you, you coagulated. It's a

Bruce

silken style tofu,

mark

right? You coagulated soy milk with this coagulant that you use. Mm-hmm. And you make a very soft, uh, tofu. And then you pour in your case, what was it? A ginger syrup?

Bruce

Ginger, orange, and omanis syrup. Okay.

mark

Wow. Okay. You pour that over the top and then you put little threads of. Uh, of orange zest on top of all of that, and he served it. And so we were looking up recipes for this, and there were tons of recipes, as you can imagine, online for this very classic Sichuan style dessert. And it's not really dessert in Chinese cuisine, but sweet. But we were serving him as a dessert. Okay. Some of the recipes that we found.

Were on food blogs, and on at least two occasions I would look at the recipe and then I would look at the, you know, smiling picture of the person mm-hmm. At the top of the thing. So I googled the person in each case, and there was absolutely no other presence for that person except that blog, which means Right. That, that's an AI generated blog designed to sell the advertisements on the page.

Bruce

Right. So what I did, just to continue on and show a little bit of how I. Overcame that. I found a website on the Omnivores Cookbook website where this woman, Maggie Ju, who runs that and has written books, tested making this recipe with five different kinds of coagulants. She used two different techniques for each kind of coagulant, and I actually had a question about what I was doing and post it.

On her website and she responded within five hours with her idea of what I needed to do if I was tripling the recipe. There you go. And it was great and it worked. So you have to be sort of interactive and see if they're responding and are they real?

mark

That's right. Uh, you probably know if you've listened to this podcast that several years ago I got very heavy into vegan cooking and making this kind of really wild new vegan cuisine, which is not like when I was a kid and vegan cuisine met. Icky tofu and brown

Bruce

rice, steam broccoli, and if you are lucky, sesame sauce. Oh god, cold ses sauce, cold, pour over a

mark

limp, wilted greens. It's just disgusting. So, um, you know, I, I wanted to get away from the moose wood stuff, sorry, moose wood. But I wanted to get away from that and I wanted to find the modern vegan stuff. So I did, and I found a lot of plaques online. A lot of the recipes I started trying were all failures. And then it occurred to me, wait a minute, these aren't really blogs by legitimate food bloggers. These are instead AI generated blogs.

And then I discovered, yes, of course I have to go out to social media and see if these people actually exist. Do they, are they, you know, are they. Pumping their blog up on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and then I could be a little more assured of the recipes. So again, and the unlikely or non-existent author is a key way. You know, this is an AI generated recipe, or even AI generated food blog. And finally look at the comments.

Bruce

Mm-hmm.

mark

They reviews if they're very bot like it's probably ai if every comment is terrific. Great. Loved it. This was good. Yeah, loved it. My kids loved it. Like with no personality behind it. Then you probably know with repetitive and bot like comments that this is an AI generated. Recipe and or blog

Bruce

online recipe blog. And are there responses to those comments too? And what are those responses like? Is every one of them thanks? Well, you know, that's probably not a real person.

mark

Oh yeah. Or even responses at all, because a lot of the programmers don't seem to know that. In fact, if you set up this blog with all these recipes on it mm-hmm. That you need to actually have a re. Bonds, any, any, uh, food writer would know to respond to people who comment on things. Right? So it, it's all part of it. And you might say, why are all of these AI blog and food blogs happening? And part of it is, as I said earlier, it's to sell advertising. Yep.

Bruce

That's what it's all about. It's

mark

so you land on the page, you see the recipe there, but what you really see, or. All of the incessant ads around it, and they're being generated in order to be essentially freeway billboards. Mm-hmm. Um, and the content in the, in the center of it is irrelevant to all the ads that are running all around it, and even in the pop-up ads that are coming off of it. That's why they're being created partly. And um, this is a problem. Okay. So there's are ways to spot AI recipes.

There's why we think they're dangerous. Now let's talk for just a minute. Mm-hmm. About why we think they are good. Because there are reasons why they're good.

Bruce

There are real reasons. I love using AI generated recipes for ideas. I can go to buzzfeed and they can, they have an AI recipe generator. I could put in things that I want to cook and it will throw ideas at me. Right. And I love that because it's sometimes if I'm in a. Funk and I can't think of something new, and I know this is what I do for a living, but sometimes my brain gets really tired and I can't think of a new chicken dish. Well, an AI can help me figure that out.

Well, what should I make for dinner? I know I have bacon, I have chicken thighs, I have rosemary, and I have olives right now. Yes, I can come up with five things right off the top of my head. I know. I know how to cook. But let's say you have all those things and you're not an experienced cook. Tell Buzzfeed's AI generator, that's what you have. It'll spit out a beautiful recipe for you. Well, e, even if

mark

you go into Google search at this point and you put in how to pan sear chicken thighs, it's gonna first give you the AI response. Mm-hmm. And actually, if you look down that AI response, I know it's easy to dismiss it, but if you look down at, if you know what you are doing, it might spur you on to do something different. Mm-hmm. But I think.

In all of what we're saying is what's good about AI generated food content and even AI generated recipes, what can be good about them is, uh, they can spur your creativity. Yep. Presuming that you already know how to cook, right.

Bruce

If you don't have a clue as how to cook a chicken thigh, if you don't know how to. Bone, a chicken thigh. That's right. You don't even know how to take the skin off a chicken thigh. That's right. Then those are not gonna be helpful to you. But if you are a pretty good cook or even just an everyday cook and you know how to put dinner on the table, then an AI generated response to I have these things in the house can, as Mark said, spur your creativity and help you make something really

mark

interesting. That's right, and I think that that's, if you're, if you're an established cook and you know what you're doing, this can be a great. Tool to help you in fact do something that is creative and interesting in the kitchen. If you're starting out or you're trying to, as I was, let's say, trying to explore modern vegan cuisine, it's actually a detriment. It's actually a, a hindrance to what you're trying to do because you're gonna end up with failures.

And I ended up with a million failures. Oh, I should say one more thing about my. Failure list just before we pass on to the end of the podcast. Oh, what, what was it? Six years ago, seven years ago, I got totally into classic British desserts and classic British sweets. Do you remember this? Oh, boy. And I, I, I parkin story parkin, and you can go to our YouTube channel and still see my video from like seven years ago of making parkin. If you don't know what that is, it.

We'll help you survive the nuclear holocaust because it's

Bruce

a lard based pastry dessert grid, I don't know what you call it,

mark

and you have to ripen it for weeks, and then it lasts like indefinitely. So it's nothing like

Bruce

ripened lard and wheat products.

mark

Yes. Nothing like it. So I. I was investigating all these things, and a British friend of mine kept saying to me, try to find a good recipe for a lardy cake. If you're from the uk, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're from the US you have no idea what I'm talking about. But she was like, I remember I was a kid. My grandmother made lardy cake, and I've never been able to find a good recipe. I went through dozens and dozens of food blogs, making, and I made all of their hard cakes.

You, the Lord he used and they were all garbage. Mm-hmm. They were all garbage. I could never make that thing work, no matter how hard I tried, based on the recipes I found. Online, and that was pre ai. God only knows what lar cake recipes look like now with AI because it's taking all of those rancid recipes from people thinking they're making lar cake. Remember that one that I made that you.

Baked it in a glass bowl and at the end I pulled it outta the oven and it was just this lump of dough sizzling in lard. It was, that had been released from the dough.

Bruce

It was a dough ball, right in lard sauce

mark

sizzling in hot lard.

Bruce

Nice.

mark

It was disgusting. So again, if you know what you're doing and I didn't, with L cake, you can actually come up with something decent with an AI recipe generator or even the Google recipe generator that occurs if you do it in the search engine. Okay. That's all we have to say about. AI and AI recipes will, I'm sure have more to say in future episodes 'cause this is an ever-changing landscape. But let's just say for a moment that we're certainly glad that you're a part of this podcast.

And if you're interested in acquiring our book called Canning, look in either the player for this podcast or look on our website. And there are ways that you can order that book. Now there is in fact an order link right in the player for this podcast. So if you're interested in this small batch canning idea without a lot of work and making just a couple choices, something, check it out and you can get it there. Okay, let's go on to the last and traditional, uh, part of this podcast.

What's making us happy in food this week: curried chili crisp and potato salad!

What's making us happy in food this week?

Bruce

It's something else from last night's dinner party. Besides that soft tofu I have in the past said that Sichuan meat pies have made me happy and I did make them last night. And yes, they made me happy. But what made me happier was a recipe from our new book, cold Canning and Curried Chili Crisp, right that I served alongside those meat pies. Now, this Curry Chili Crisp was one of the hottest spiciest recipes in the book.

And I had, it's odd, I was a little afraid there were some new people who had never eaten at our house before that were at this dinner party. So I had the chili crisp and little bowls on the plates. You could spoon it in every single person. Ate every drop of chili crab and it will dipping and slathering it onto their meat

mark

bucket. That stuff was not for the faint of part. I mean, I've had, Bruce has been sitting in the house for a while now. Bruce made it a few weeks ago. Uh, we actually posted a video, didn't we, of it on TikTok, don't I? If not, I

Bruce

will. 'cause that's time

mark

to make some more. I, I think so. Anyway, um, it, it's really hot. It's incredibly burny, but it is incredibly delicious and I ate all mine. Mm-hmm. I ate every bit of that chili crisp on the ses meat guys want. So I guess what's making me happy in food this week is a summer treat, and that is potato salad. And this week Bruce was grilling chicken thighs because it's this summer and also this week in New England it was 5 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

So that meant you grilled outside and he made a potato salad and. Uh, I have to say that, uh, we don't put hard boiled eggs No. In our potato salad. Gross. But he put raw broccoli florets in there and it was delicious. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I had never had, I know it's such a silly, simple thing, but I never had bro raw broccoli in a potato salad, and it just was fantastic. I ate way more than my fair share. That was good. And you made a ton of it, so we had it over a couple of meals. Mm-hmm.

Hmm. I don't know. Potato salad is just summer. I think really for me, it's, uh, especially from where I'm from, it's summer. If you set the mayonnaise potato salad out on the back deck for like three hours and then eat it. Now it's summer. Mm. What is summer without, uh, bad potato salad. Okay. Gross. Gross. Um, anyway. We didn't, we refrigerated ours and it was fine. So raw broccoli and data salad is an amazing thing. So that's what's making us happy in food this week.

Thanks for joining us on this podcast. Thanks for being a part of this journey. We appreciate your time spent with us, and we hope you learn something about AI generated recipes.

Bruce

And I wanna remind you all that we have a Facebook group called. Cooking with Bruce and Mark. You can go share what you're eating there with us, and also we have a TikTok channel cooking with Bruce and Mark. Go to TikTok, check out our channel. We have videos of us cooking. We have videos of us talking about our life and what we like to eat and don't like to eat. So please go to our TikTok channel and subscribe there to cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And don't forget to come back for another episode every week Cooking with Mark.

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