Take Your Cooking to a Whole New Level with Chef Watson and the Institute of Culinary Education!
You don't have to be a culinary genius to be a great cook. But when it comes to thinking outside the box, even the best chefs can be limited by their personal experiences, the tastes and flavor combinations they already know. That's why IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education teamed up to develop a groundbreaking cognitive cooking technology that helps cooks everywhere discover and create delicious recipes, utilizing unusual ingredient combinations that man alone might never imagine.
In Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson, IBM's unprecedented technology and ICE's culinary experts present more than 65 original recipes exploding with irresistible new flavors. Together, they have carefully crafted, evaluated and perfected each of these dishes for "pleasantness" (superb taste), "surprise" (innovativeness) and a "synergy" of mouthwatering ingredients that will delight any food lover.
Sprinkled throughout the book are cooking tips from the pros at ICE, entertaining anecdotes on the various stages of IBM and ICE's collaboration and ideas for home cooks to expand their repertoires or spice up current favorites. From Chef Watson's first recipe ever, the Spanish Almond Crescent, to Creole Shrimp-Lamb Dumplings, Italian-Pumpkin Cheesecake, and Hoof-and-Honey Ale,Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson introduces home cooks and professional chefs to a whole new world of culinary possibilities.
The newest cookbook on the market was compiled by a chef who has never tasted a single morsel of food , the book s introduction points out. This culinary prodigy, in fact, has no taste buds, no nose, not any sensual experience of food or drink. This could be the world s first collection of recipes created by artificial intelligence. Watson, IBM s cognitive system that famously defeated two human grand champions to win the US quiz show Jeopardy, has turned its attention to the kitchen. Alimentary, my dear Watson: can a supercomputer rival human chefs? For several years, the virtual chef has been poring over troves of recipes and food-related data, from classic meal combinations to research on flavour preferences and the chemical composition of foods. The computer was programmed to produce ideas for food combinations that would taste pleasant at a molecular level and that, crucially, had not yet been tried. The surprising results include the Spanish Almond Crescent, a butterless and sugar-free pastry flavoured with pepper, saffron and coconut milk; asparagus grilled with pig s feet croquettes and mustard foam; an apple and pork kebab cooked with mushrooms, strawberries and curry powder; ale brewed with veal stock; plum pancetta cider; and a bacon dessert made from porcini mushrooms, walnut meal and dried figs. IBM said it wanted to apply its innovation to a field that every human being appreciates: food . Steve Abrams, the head of IBM's Watson research centre in New York, said in September that the cookbook could help humans who not in the scientific community understand the rather abstract concept of the cognitive machine, making it easier to explain to people the power of computational creativity . The book s introduction spells out how similar systems could help people tailor foods to their medical and financial needs, allow schools and hospitals to create tastier and more nutritious meals, and revolutionise industries from pharmaceuticals and chemicals to media and the arts. This cookbook shows not only how far Watson has come, but also the incredible, untapped potential of further collaborations between man and machine. Recipe invented by supercomputer: Middle Eastern Chickpea Ragout Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson: Recipes for Innovation from IBM & the Institute of Culinary Education contains 65 recipes and is available in hardcover from April 14. --Telegraph - 13th April 2015
