How ChatGPT Took Me From Baking Disaster to Masterchef

One a penny, two a penny, AI buns

As a product manager and part-time coder, I’ve seen first-hand the value of taking some text or code and using ChatGPT to help me infinitely improve it. If ChatGPT could refactor my code, it could surely help improve my cooking.

Hot Cross buns, specifically, are my culinary kryptonite. This subtly sweetened, yeast-leavened bread native to the British Isles is both delicious and an absolute pain to bake. Despite multiple attempts, my buns better resembled hockey pucks than digestible delicacies. With only stodgy bricks to show for my efforts, I had vowed never to make these tasty treats again… until recently, that is.

Then one day, my American colleague strolled into the office, their hands brimming with a basket of homemade hot cross buns. Each one was a fluffy delight — a sweet slap in the face to my British pride. The gauntlet was thrown — I would master this recipe! But this time would be different. This time I had the power of large language models on my side.

I mean, baking is not that different from coding right, right? A logically deductive combination of chemicals producing a desired result. Sure, I could find better recipes online, but I tried that before, and it doesn’t help.

To achieve this, I will combine some of the most successful prompting techniques I’ve learned using ChatGPT: Role Setting, Chain of Thought, and Self-Reflexion.

Role setting means giving the AI a focused purpose. Most of the time, asking the all-seeing ChatGPT sage is fine, but you can get the best results by focusing on its intent and drive. For example, I don’t want my AI to start randomly talking about the logistics of sourcing raisins.

To achieve this, I prompted:

You are BakerGPT. A Michelin award-winning baker who is here to help me create some of the most delicious baked items in human history, drawing inspiration and techniques from any source to achieve this goal. You will assist me in developing recipes and ask me clarifying questions if you think it will help you improve your answers or suggestions. If you understand, respond: UNDERSTOOD

Excellent, so I’ve successfully explained to BakerGPT that I wanted to make amazing hot cross buns.

Next, I want to improve its results by providing some examples of recipes I used before. This is called Chain of Thought Prompting. To achieve this, we will provide the AI with examples of things I would like it to imitate before asking it to generate its own. Usually, this would be stuff like a poem or press release, but recipes would be best in our case. It’s like a mini training session for the AI, helping reduce the risk of hallucinating weird solutions like using olive oil instead of butter. So I provided some examples of hot cross bun recipes I found online, and I already can see it commenting and even trying to suggest its own. Not so fast, BakerGPT!

So we have our overqualified assistant who has been researching buns all its life. Let’s ask it to engage in some self-reflexion — what does it think makes a good or bad hot cross bun recipe?

So that’s promising — it seems to know exactly the qualities I’m after! Let’s ask what we must do with the recipe to get the best characteristics whilst eliminating the bad.

I want more reflexion! How could it make the recipe even better?

Let’s pause here because this is super impressive. Right away, the suggestion of bread improver had never even occurred to me. I mean, what even is bread improver? A quick search reveals a mixture of emulsifiers, enzymes, and flour treatment agents that help break down gluten and improve the quality of the dough and final rise. That sounds just like what I need! Other great shouts include soaking the dried fruit in orange juice and pre-fermenting. Nice to also know I could adapt this to be gluten-free or vegan if required.

Ok, so this all sounds great. Let’s ask it to generate a recipe using all the suggestions provided. Here is what it produced:

With bated breath and fingers crossed, I set out to create these AI-inspired buns. Hours of my life were at stake, and tension in the kitchen was palpable… then, finally, the iPhone timer pinged. I had done it, and I have to say the results were nothing short of spectacular.

I brought a bunch into the office. My colleagues were blown away by how soft, moist, and flavourful these were (even after sitting in Tupperware for 2 days). Somehow through the alchemy of prompt engineering and baking, I’d made something incredible. I was running around the flat proclaiming to my partner we should start an AI bakery.

But why stop there? How far could we push this?

Growing up in an Iraqi-Austrian household, the exotic aromas and bold flavors of the Middle East were a comforting constant. So I decided to pay homage to my roots and mix some of those techniques and flavors into my buns, asking ChatGPT to reimagine this recipe from an Iraqi perspective. The idea of taking a British baked good with a literal cross on it and the best of the middle east has something of a crusader-esk poor taste to it.

Still, the results were anything but — an unholy union of deliciousness.

A hot cross bun perfect for dipping with hummus? I’d found heaven! These buns were impressive, and the use of dried apricots with spices and cheese felt like little bites of bliss evoking memories of my father baking.

I went on to create a few more variations: Latvian baltic buns with smoked ham, grated gouda, minced garlic, and chopped dill; Japanese Umami Cross Buns with tamagoyaki omelet, shitake mushroom, and pickled ginger flavored with soy sauce and mirin; and finally the Welsh Celtic Buns comprised of strong cheddar, crumbled laverbread (seaweed) and crispy bacon topped off with fresh chives.

Some of the wilder experiments asked what a hot cross bun could look like inspired by Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake (sweetened red bean paste, matcha, and chopped candied yuzu) or clothing brand H&M (milk and white chocolate chips with toasted hazelnuts and vanilla).

What surprised me about all this was how fun it is to use a tool like ChatGPT to create my own test kitchen of ideas. It’s like a cooking simulator, a real-world version of Nintendo’s ‘Cooking Mama’. Within seconds I could be dreaming up new recipes and flavors with no limits on what techniques or ingredients to experiment with from any regional culinary background or school of cooking.

Machines are particularly well suited to this as their connections are more diverse and thus have a less compartmentalized view of the world than us humans. Even if I did not have an ingredient, ChatGPT could suggest an alternative or let me know if something in the cupboard would work.

What is exciting about this for me is not just being able to produce better recipes but the ability to take chances and be more creative and curious in our approach to food. You usually find a recipe, buy the ingredients, cook, and hope for the best.

Now with AI, we are freed up to play with it, tailor it to our tastes, and even ask why something may be better or worse. A chance to even take old recipes and rework them into something new. After all, very few (if any) foods are invented. Most are contemporary twists on traditional themes.

As Lynne Olver wrote on the Food Timeline, “Today’s grilled cheese sandwich is connected to ancient cooks who melted cheese on bread. 1950s meatloaf is connected to ground cooked meat products promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which are, in turn, related to ancient Roman minces.”

As a culture, we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals. Since the mid-sixties, the time spent preparing meals has fallen by half. While the global trend is the same, Americans lead the way, spending less time cooking than any other country. I hope using AI to cook this way is more fun and exciting than working from prescribed recipes and will bring an entirely new type of cook into the kitchen.

You see, cooking changes your relationship with food. Instead of consuming something, now you’re making it. The more people we can get interested in cooking and asking questions about where ingredients come from can only be better for us and our environment. The alternative is that we become so alienated that within a generation, cooking a meal from scratch will seem as exotic and ambitious — as “extreme” — as most of us today regard brewing beer, baking a loaf of bread, or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.

I wouldn’t recommend asking a tool like ChatGPT to generate something from scratch just yet. Still, as shown above, a mixture of specific prompts that set Roles and use Chain of Thought prompting and Reflexion is particularly effective in achieving the best results for not just cooking but many forms of creative work.

Now, every time I see a hot cross bun, I no longer feel a sense of dread — AI has given me a chance to think differently about baking. To those willing to experiment, AI makes exploring things like cooking more accessible. Meals become achievements, expressions, discoveries, and relationships and help us honor in a way where we come from.

This mad hybrid of human, machine, and food goes beyond nutritionism and essentialism. It serves as a tool for training that connects us with nature and teaches us how to utilize AI for a brighter future.

Happy prompt baking everyone.