NYT Cooking’s AI assistant handled ingredient substitutions and a lost Bundt pan during a week of testing, but it stumbled on a cake recipe and raised questions about how modified recipes are saved. The tool, built into the recipe pages of the New York Times Cooking app, generates a revised version of a recipe rather than altering the original, and The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy tested it on weeknight cooking, swaps, and scaling.
The assistant appears in a text box on the recipe page labeled “Customize this recipe…” Users type requests, such as asking for a substitute or asking the tool to scale a dish and make it vegan and gluten-free. The New York Times has said the feature can also suggest equipment substitutions and convert measurements, an option that has been in the app for a couple of years. According to the article, the assistant was trained on user comments and on guidance from NYT Cooking editors about requests that would produce bad results.
In the first test, Tuohy opened One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Ginger and told the assistant she had chicken tenders, fresh ginger, garlic, rice, broth, limes, green beans, and red onions, but no chard, cilantro, or scallions. Within seconds the tool produced a new recipe titled One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Ginger and Green Beans, with a shorter browning time for the tenders, the red onion cooked alongside the chicken, and the green beans steamed over the rice for the last eight minutes. Each change was highlighted under a Your Version tab, and the original recipe remained available.
The tool also agreed to a Thai basil substitution for the missing cilantro and explained how the flavor would change. When asked about replacing makrut lime leaves in a Thai red curry, it said grated lime zest would work but would lack the deeper floral and herbal aroma. It converted metric weights to US measurements in a caramel apple Dutch baby recipe, warned that fresh cayenne peppers would bring sharp heat to a halibut dish, and refused a request to use minced beef in place of ladyfingers in a trifle.
The assistant nearly halved the butter in a cake. Asked to convert a recipe for a Bundt pan into muffins, it cut the cooking time from three hours to 50 minutes and split the batter across two 12-muffin tins; a follow-up request to halve the recipe produced three eggs instead of an unhelpful two and a half. Tuohy bought a Bundt pan to make the original as well, and both versions turned out well, but she could not save the modified recipe separately, which caused confusion when she cooked the original.
Tuohy also compared the assistant with Alexa Plus on an Echo Show 11 smart display. Alexa offered the same substitution guidance for the chicken and rice dish with slightly different cooking times, but it could not display the modified recipe and, when asked to walk through the changes, improvised instructions to cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces that were not in the revised recipe. Tuohy found the Cooking app more reliable, though she said voice control would help when her hands are messy.
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