Oliver White

AI helps me develop new recipes. Here's the surprisingly useful workflow.

Before anyone gets upset — I'm not asking AI to write recipes. I'm using it as a thinking partner in the development process, and there's a big difference. Here's how it works for me: I'll have an idea. Say I want to create a dish around macadamia nuts and finger lime as a dessert component. I'll tell Claude that and ask it to tell me what flavours and textures work well with both ingredients, what classic flavour pairings exist, and what techniques I might not have considered. It gives me ideas I can then take into the kitchen to explore. Sometimes they're obvious things I already knew. Sometimes there's something I hadn't thought of. The other thing I use it for: testing the logic of a recipe before I cook it. I'll describe what I'm planning to do and ask if anything seems off — any steps that might not work, any flavour combinations that are risky, any technique questions. It caught a mistake in my nut praline timing last month that would have ruined a batch. It doesn't replace cooking instinct. But it's a surprisingly good thinking partner for someone who thinks out loud.