Ever since GPT-4V came out and Julius started accepting images, I’ve enjoyed talking to it about different recipes and cooking ideas. One major downside of cooking websites is that it’s difficult to alter existing setups for some recipes or find substitutes for ingredients and you can’t ask any practical questions of them.
GPT and Opus were trained on a lot of recipe data, which means that Julius has the ability to discuss, explain and alter recipes.
Jam
I have a jam maker at home and have been using Julius to help me cook using available ingredients. It’s aware of general ingredient ratios that go into different jams and jellies. Since my jam maker makes only a certain amount it means I usually have to adapt online recipes to my jam maker, which is annoying and not often clear how to do especially if they have something like liquid pectin and you have powdered of a different brand.
Julius has no such issues. I told it that I have cherries at home and a jam maker, sugar and pectin. Then we further discussed general chemistry understanding of how acid reacts with pectin to form that specific consistency. Finally, it gave me a table of ingredient ratios for common fruits to make their jams, along with additional ingredients that make the more interesting.
In the past, I’ve learned from Julius that blueberries go well with some lemon, but this time I learned that strawberries go well with balsamic vinegar and cherries go well with almond extract!
Anyways, here is the conversation. Simple and fast. Very helpful.
Nigiri
I started getting ingredients for nigiri today when I quickly glanced a TikTok video showing a Japanese chef put ahi tuna in boiling water for some indeterminate amount of time and then soak in some liquid until I accidentally refreshed the home page and lost it.
So I asked Julius to confirm my suspicions about the process and tried to make it myself with the provided instructions. Julius, once again, has a gread understanding of principles behind nigiri and was helpful.
Here is that conversation.
The possibilities are great with Julius and cooking. You can try new techniques, learn new recipes, understand the chemistry of cooking and export data. You can do other things I haven’t covered here like giving it existing recipes and asking it to explain and help, discuss reasons behind certain ingredient uses and amounts.
