NYT Cooking’s AI assistant saved my weeknight chicken, but almost ruined my cake

Around 7PM each weeknight, I find myself standing in front of the fridge, trying to decide on something for dinner that won’t make my husband complain, “Chicken again?” Yes, I should meal plan more, but I don’t, so this is where I’m at. A nightly battle in which the chicken usually wins.

Recently, my best weapon in this fight has been AI. Between Alexa Plus in the Echo smart display on my kitchen counter, the Samsung Food app on my fridge, and even an AI-powered cooking robot, AI has become my go-to sous chef — albeit one I need to keep a close eye on. It’s helped me swap ingredients, generate ideas, fix things when I mess up, and yes, even cook better. So I was intrigued when my go-to recipe app, NYT Cooking, introduced an AI assistant.

Many, including some NYT Cooking users and recipe purists, are skeptical of this new tool (available to subscribers on iOS only at launch), and I get why. One of the things I like most about NYT Cooking is that it features thousands of recipes from dozens of reputable sources — such as the New York Times archives, restaurants, cookbooks, and food columnists — and real people have tested them. (I’ve tried some purely AI-generated recipes and they were not good).

Another great feature of the service, which I’ve been paying for for several years, is the reader comments. Here, I’ve often found solutions to cooking dilemmas, like what to substitute for makrut lime leaves — there’s always one slightly bougie ingredient in an NYT Cooking recipe that I don’t have on hand.

However, reading through hundreds of comments to find answers at 7PM on a weeknight isn’t always practical. And this is where I’ve found the NYT Cooking assistant helpful. Among other things, it was trained on user comments, and in my few days testing it, it provided practical substitutions and solid cooking guidance for the new ingredients. It also won’t unquestionably agree to crazy requests (I tried!). As with all AI tools, it’s not perfect — it almost made me put half the required butter in my cake — but as a tool, it is useful and feels like a solid application of AI. Importantly, it doesn’t change the existing recipe; it leaves it as is and creates a new one for you.

The assistant appears in the app in a small text box on the recipe page with a prompt: “Customize this recipe…” From here, you type in a question to adapt it to your needs. This can be as simple as “What can I substitute for this ingredient?” to “Scale this recipe to feed seven people, and make it vegan and gluten-free.” The New York Times has also said the feature can suggest substitutions for cooking equipment and convert measurements; the latter option has been in the app for a couple of years.

Last Friday night, instead of staring aimlessly into the fridge, I turned to the Chicken folder in my NYT Cooking app Recipe Box and found a One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Ginger I’d been wanting to try. Only I didn’t have chicken thighs or half the ingredients.

I typed my dilemma into the assistant box on the recipe page: “I have chicken tenders, fresh ginger, garlic, rice, broth, limes, but no chard or cilantro or scallions. I do have green beans and red onions.” Within seconds, it created a new version of the recipe, with a new title: One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Ginger and Green Beans. It suggested a shorter browning time for the tenders, cooking the red onion alongside the chicken, and steaming the green beans on top of the rice for the last eight minutes instead of the chard. Every change was highlighted in the new recipe under a Your Version tab, and I could flip back to the original at any point.

I noticed it hadn’t adjusted for the lack of cilantro, saying it was optional. So I asked if I could use Thai basil, which I happen to have, and it agreed, highlighting how it would change the flavor. While I could have figured out a lot of these steps myself, maybe with the help of Google, it was nice to have validation that my modifications wouldn’t make the dish taste terrible and nice not to have to swipe out of the app. The NYT Cooking editors say it’s been trained not to comply with requests that will taste bad.

The resulting dish — which took the same amount of time to cook as the original — was delicious and got my husband’s seal of approval (he just had the leftovers for lunch). It was very different from the recipe Yasmin Fahr wrote, and I can see the purists’ point. But the rewritten recipe was much easier to use and produced a better dish than winging it with my own subs gleaned from the comments section, which I usually do with varying degrees of success.

I cook regularly, so I had a sense of what ingredients I had on hand that might work for the dish I wanted to make. But the assistant can also help if you have no idea what to use as a substitute. For example, I was cooking a Thai red curry and asked what I could use instead of makrut lime leaf. It replied, saying that grated lime zest would work, but “it misses the deeper floral, herbal aroma” of fresh limes. (See? Bougie.)

Over the weekend, I tried several more swaps, asking whether half-and-half would work instead of cream in a caramel apple Dutch baby, or if Castelvetrano olives and smoked paprika could stand in for kalamata and chile pepper in a roasted halibut dish. Swapping spices is always a bold move in any dish, as it can really ruin the flavor.

I also had the app convert the Dutch baby recipe’s metric weights to US measurements, which it did seamlessly. Then I threw in some curveballs. How about using fresh cayenne peppers with the halibut? It warned me that substituting cayenne for chile “brings significant, sharp heat.” Could I swap ladyfingers for minced beef in this trifle (à la Rachel Green in Friends)? “Minced beef cannot be used in place of the ladyfingers or anywhere in this sweet dessert trifle.” Good call.

While I was cooking, I compared the NYT Cooking assistant with Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI voice assistant I regularly use to help me cook via the Echo Show 11 smart display in my kitchen. Interestingly, it offered the same guidance as the Cooking assistant on substitutions for the chicken and rice dish, but with slightly different cooking times. Alexa pulls some recipes from the NYT app through a partnership between the companies.

However, Alexa couldn’t show the modified recipe on its screen; it could only tell me the changes while showing the original. When I asked it to walk me through them, it got confused and improvised, telling me to cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces — which wasn’t in the modified recipe. Overall, I found using the Cooking app more reliable, although messier. It would be great to be able to use voice control to navigate the app, as I can with Alexa on my smart display, rather than using my garlicky fingers.

Time for a bigger challenge: baking.

I am typically not a baker. My cakes come out flat, and my cookies don’t crumble. Even the smart mixer I tested a few years ago couldn’t save me. I also rarely have the right equipment. So I took Cinnamon Roll Bundt Cake, a recipe by NYT Cooking editor Genevieve Ko (who announced the AI feature), and asked it to turn it into muffins. (Who has a Bundt cake pan?!)

It modified the recipe’s cooking time from three hours to 50 minutes and split the batter across two 12-muffin tins. But that was going to make 24 muffins, way too many for me. So I asked it to halve the recipe to get 12 muffins. This led to some smart choices, like halving five eggs to three instead of an unhelpful two and a half.

For science, I bought a Bundt pan to make the original version too. Both turned out great, but things got a bit sticky when I swapped between the original recipe and the AI version in the app. You can’t save your new recipe separately, which caused confusion when I was cooking the original. Instead of scrolling back through the recipe with sticky fingers, I asked the assistant how much butter I needed (using voice typing), and it gave me the modified recipe’s 6 tablespoons rather than the original’s three-quarter cup, without telling me which version it was using. You can delete your version, which I would advise doing to avoid issues like this — 6 tablespoons of butter would have made for a dry cake.

If you already read all the comments before starting a New York Times recipe, then you will probably find this tool offers a similar experience in a more streamlined way. For everyday problems — wrong cut of chicken, no cilantro, or no Bundt cake pan — it was genuinely helpful and saved me a trip to the store. It was also smart enough to know when to say no to minced beef in a trifle.

As with every AI tool I’ve used in the kitchen, the NYT Cooking AI assistant works well as a sous chef, but it’s not the head chef — I still felt the need to double-check amounts and cooking times and cross-reference them with the original to make sure it hadn’t done something outlandish.

If you’re a purist, you can just ignore the assistant. While you can’t turn off the chat box, it’s easy to scroll past. I do think it will make me use the app more often, since I no longer need to worry as much when I don’t have makrut lime leaves on hand or the right cut of meat. For me, standing in front of the fridge with chicken tenders and no plan, it’s been a useful addition to my nightly cooking routine.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge