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Comment by cogogo | Hacker News Reader

If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.

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I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.

To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.

In terms of temp and time surely if you know enough to judge it's correctness, you would not need it in the first place? Code correctness is rather objective and easily testable. Cooking is rather subjective and only testable with great effort and time. I just checked 4 models on a 4lb pork shoulder in an oven. Flash was super off, suggesting you could pull at 145-150F for a sliced roast. Yeah, you could and it would fucking suck. The per lb time and total time also didn't add up. The others were better but varied. Only one (opus) thought to ask if it was bone-in. If you're very specific you could certainly have it aggregate a bunch of recipes to get a sense of what's close to a good answer, but ultimately it depends on what sources it chooses.

I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.

I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.

I recently roasted a 5lb leg of lamb. Temp was pretty obvious but I had never cooked meat this way so an idea on time is really useful. Google search is a disaster for this kind of question. And I guess I have never encountered a good general cook book that I feel comfortable building off of.

I think all the science of cooking ones are a good bet for generalist knowledge. Some of the more textbook like ones as well. The food lab and on food and cooking stand out, but there are many others. I'm not sure I'd classify them as cookbooks.

Food lab, for example, covers buying storing and cooking lamb + a guide for a 5-7lb boneless leg across 5 or so pages. Kenji goes through great lengths to build intuition. I'm sure larousse, which is more of an encyclopedia, covers lamb quite extensively but it's probably more terse.

The internet can be an excellent source, but like most things it depends on who is writing it down.

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