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All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

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Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#171
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to wade through the bullshit is a valuable skill, and the worse your cooking is the less valuable an LLM will be. That said, prompting matters. Something like the following, chased with any necessary questions to ground the details at your skill level, is likely to get you an above-average result. Better cooking skills allow you to ask better follow-on questions, or (context windows matter) create new sess…

Where did you have 10k omakase?

Elaborating on my last comment, I didn't. Kusakabe is great though if you want something comparatively cheaper.

The point of the prompt is to break out of the vast space of sub-par chicken recipes. Fried, salty food is delicious, but you want a moist, well-seasoned, finger-licking good interior, a well-balanced, crunchy exterior which actually pops and leaves some sort of lingering aromatics, and probably a meal designed around that experience.

Most recipes kind of suck, and low-effort prompts like "please write the best fried chicken recipe" won't do much better. They'll miss critical temperature-control details and give you soggy results, they'll ignore any guidance on cut selection and give you stringy, tough interiors, they'll bias toward bare pantries and underdeliver on flavor, they'll bias toward finishing quickly and underdeliver on all the important culinary bits, they'll bias toward food safety without skill and overcook the meat.

Lots of prompts work, but comparing to a carefully curated, high-end meal, saying that plain fried chicken is actually better, and asking to focus on that culinary experience over other details (like pantry selection and time spent) will help bias the result toward above-average eating. Will you experience transcendence from an LLM chicken recipe? Very likely not. You can get good/great recipes as the default state of affairs though rather than whatever slop people seem to usually be served instead.

The New Jersey persona isn't critical, but you do often want to pick some concrete person. Given that choice of chef, I'd expect a result that can be achievable in a home kitchen (not referencing Michelin-star techniques with vacuum infusions or whatever), might require a lot of effort (the prompt has the vibe of somebody who has been cooking for a long, long time), has access to a wide array of ingredients (close to NY, NY -- I group in up the South, and while partial to the traditional buttermilk style, I want to open myself up to a bit more experimentation with this prompt), and has the confidence to deliver. Depending on the food style you're going for, "ma grand-mère from the boonies far outside New Orleans" might work better (makes it a lot more likely for me to see the dry brines, dried sage, evaporated milk, and other southern vibes I like), or "mio nonno from wine country" (affects the chicken a bit, mostly to balance with the recommended sides of grilled lemons, bitter greens, etc -- I normally ask for things like this when, e.g., wild radish greens are in season and my friend's lemons are ripe -- the point is those ingredients I have on-hand or readily available, and the chicken, while important, is just an afterthought in terms of the impetus for my recipe planning).

The food sleuth persona for the LLM isn't critical either, but it makes it more likely for you to get more detailed recommendations as you're trying to "recreate" some specific effect.

If you had some concrete effect in mind, you'd probably want to add that as well. I left it a bit open-ended.

Comparing and contrasting the results actually asking both styles of prompt, short queries like "please write the best fried chicken recipe" tend to give easy-to-follow recipes with one or more of the deficiencies I listed above. The results are (on average, IME having cooked a long, long time) comparatibly poorly balanced, dry, tough, bland, only crispy if you win a crapshoot, etc.

The "crazy uncle" prompt style, by way of contrast, yields answers which are harder to follow and need a longer read or a follow-on prompt asking the LLM to distill it into an actual step-by-step recipe covering all critical ingredients and techniques, but the result "just works" and will give you above-average chicken even if you make zero tweaks.

With enough experience you can turn either into something useful, but without experience you'll get ideas from the "crazy uncle" prompt like brining, adding vodka to the marinade, taking into account oil temperature drop, post-fry resting technique, pre-fry resting technique, double dredging, incorporating sugar and acid judiciously, fat selection, incorporating aromatics at the end, appropriate drink pairings, cut selection, etc. It's just...better. You can later look up any of those things and see why they matter. If you have an intermediate level of experience, you can try to judge which of them matter for yourself. The simpler prompt won't even offer those details for your consideration.

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#172

FWIW all of https://publicdomainrecipes.com is available as a single 22MiB file at https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#publicdomainrecipes.... from https://browse.library.kiwix.org and you can submit more recipes at https://github.com/ronaldl29/public-domain-recipes

PS: .zim file added to my offline_prep directory on my HDD. Just in case.

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#173
post #126
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients.

> Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients. I think fpshero says exactly that ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294459 ): > I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together. > The flavor bible.

oh god I swear it said something different when I posted, or maybe I had too many cups of coffee yesterday...

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#174
post #49
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh - the dependency graph recipe card. These are excellent. I've imagined something like this forever. Always annoyed that recipes put ingredients in a giant undifferentiated list and then give an instruction like "mix the dry ingredients in a deep bowl". For a while I expected there could be a good return on a good implementation of this, but now as soon as a strong interface itself is created it seems easy to copy…

Feels like one might be able to get an llm to convert an annoying to read recipe into a mermaid dependency graph following this example. Might be worth a try!

I asked perplexity to convert a simple recipe to a dependency graph and it works pretty well! I like this graph to figure out my cooking workflow. What tasks can be started independently and what needs to be done before others.

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together. The flavor bible. I can assure you that it does not contain 1800 ingredients in all of there combinations, but it does a remarkable job of covering a widely used selection of herbs spices vegetables and meats. I doubt a compressed version of the text would even be very large. The trouble I find with LLM generated recipes is th…

yeah I took a look at this and others and tried to pull together some helpful 'flavor maps': https://transcendent-choux-d1b930.netlify.app/

do you have a key for the color meanings?

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only a “few thousand ingredients” seems like orders of magnitude off

I'm sorry to repeat myself but this bothers me because this is my specialization. There are less than 7 thousand ingredients [1]. Even if you think it's way more than that on account of underrepresented cultures (which does not seem to be the case in this particular study), it's still just a few thousand. Most cuisines use around 50 of them. [1] https://flowingdata.com/2018/09/18/cuisine-ingredients/ The total number…

I suppose it depends on what you count as an ingredient, even still it's greater than 7 thousand. I'm not sure what you mean by it's "your specialization" so I'm happy to hear what you could elaborate on, but I'm a bit stumped. Almost any given state in southern Mexico or any of the tropical latin American countries has thousands of ingredients from native herbs, leafy greens, chiles, spices, bugs, sea life, mammals, snakes and lizards, birds, ferments, mushrooms and fungus, tree barks, seeds, milks, any number of vegetables and fruits. Even an animal has non "meat" ingredients like blood, rennet and bile, bone marrow, do you count brains and intestines and offal here? I can't imagine where you're getting this less than 7 thousand number nor your confidence about it to be honest.

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#179
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OPM looks like a great way to implement a free-style crafting system for a roguelike. I mean instead of having standard recipes that you have to assemble you could invent your own by putting together basic ingredients but then you need a way to know what comes out (and its effects I guess). I don't know if any existing games do that.

I mean Minecraft is quite similar in concept. Start with wood and stone and end up with an atomic bomb. Also useful to watch Dr. Stone anime.

That's right. Hadn't thought of Minecraft, was thinking very narrowly about roguelikes. Text based and all.

Re: All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

#180
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OPM looks like a great way to implement a free-style crafting system for a roguelike. I mean instead of having standard recipes that you have to assemble you could invent your own by putting together basic ingredients but then you need a way to know what comes out (and its effects I guess). I don't know if any existing games do that.

Also have a look at Inform 7[1] (domain specific language for interactive fiction), specifically the "Stone" example section[2] which explains edible food and the effects different foods may have on the adventurer. It's similar concept to OPM with some modelling basics already built on top for player movement throughout a world, player interaction with objects (looking at, lifting, moving), and many other primitives…

Thanks! I know Inform. Haven't used it but I know of it and I think I've even played a few games written with some version of it. Adventure games don't usually do what I had in mind but maybe it's possible to do just not something very relevant to the genre?
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