Cooking with Chef Watson, the Computer That Won 'Jeopardy'

— -- You may remember Watson, the computer that wowed the world back in 2011 when it won first place in “Jeopardy!” against two humans for a $1 million prize.

Defined by IBM, Watson is a “cognitive technology that processes information more like a human than a computer – by understanding natural language, generating hypotheses based on evidence and learning as it goes.”

Now four years since its big television debut, Watson may no longer be competing in game shows, but nonetheless has been very busy. Doctors are able to identify diseases with greater ease and precision using Watson’s knowledge on every disease ever discovered and what those symptoms are. Pharmaceutical companies utilize Watson for cancer research, since it can process every medical-related article – more than one million a year – to identify trends, highlight areas worth investigating and more. And, perhaps most surprisingly, home cooks and chefs alike can now tap into Watson’s knowledge for recipe creation.

Florian Pinel, IBM’s lead engineer for Chef Watson, utilized the foodpairing method, which is based on the idea in Western cuisine that the more flavor compounds different ingredients share, the more likely they are to taste good together. For example, bacon & cheese and asparagus & butter share many of the same flavor compounds and, as is commonly acknowledged, taste really good together. So, Pinel programmed Watson with that information and paired up with “Bon Appetit” to teach Watson how to craft a recipe.

“When a home cook goes in, they’re asked what ingredient or dish or cuisine they’re interested in, and they’ll get suggestions and recommendations based on ‘Bon Appetit’ recipes,” Pinel told ABC News. “These are new recipes, complete with proportions and steps that have never existed before but are inspired by ‘Bon Appetit.’ Once Watson has created a new combination of ingredients, then it looks for the most similar recipe in our database of existing recipes and uses that as a template to adapt the proportions and recipe steps.”

After years of work, Pinel and his team have gone live with Chef Watson at IBMChefWatson.com where users can try the recipe generator out.

“We have users who need instructions, so it’s actually a challenge that has never been taken before to generate instructions for a product that has never been made, but I think we’re doing pretty well,” Pinel said. “Then you have chefs and more advanced users who really want to see the combinations of ingredients they wouldn’t have thought of and that actually work, and that’s what inspires them and makes the value of Chef Watson to them. Chef Watson has been tremendously inspiring in that domain, and that’s what you see in the cookbook.”

The cookbook “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson,” out today, which was created through a partnership between IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City.

“IBM came to us at ICE in early 2012 and kind of floated the idea and explained to us the scope of the project was all about which was really how can you be more creative and they thought food was a great way to explore that,” ICE’s creative director Michael Laiskonis told ABC News. “It certainly gave us ideas we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. We stayed very literal to the outputs that the system gave us just in the spirit of the exercise and the challenge itself. If we were plugging in certain parameters and the output gave us celery as an ingredient, it pushed me to think in a way I hadn’t before about what could be celery. There’s celery stalk, leaf, roots, seed. So it kind of got me thinking in that direction.”

The cookbook contains dishes that make no sense intellectually, but through Watson’s flavorpairing knowledge and ICE chefs’ culinary acumen, come together in surprisingly delicious and delightful ways. One dish combines cherries and olives, which share high levels of similar flavor compounds, but doesn’t sound appetizing on the surface. But when this writer tasted the combination, she was reaching back again and again for the play of salty, sweet and briny flavors. Another dish adds steak and beef broth to a cocktail, which sounds gross, but the salinity and savoriness of the broth offset the bitter beer and sweet wine in a very engaging way.

One of the dishes that most surprised Laiskonis was an Austrian chocolate burrito, which contained chocolate, ground beef, queso fresco, edamame beans and apricot salsa wrapped in a tortilla.

“We presented it in a very familiar form like any other burrito, but the flavor profiles were totally different. We debuted that at South by Southwest and it was a hit,” Laisoknis said. “I think that’s an interesting way to approach creativity – to present novel flavor combinations in a familiar way or present familiar flavor combinations in a new way. Those are two different directions a chef can take, and the Watson can help us do both.”

Laiskonis stressed that Chef Watson does not replace the human element of cooking, but rather enhances it. He suggested using the app in a grocery store or farmer’s market and picking one ingredient that you like and building a dish around it with Watson’s help.

“It’s kind of like having access to hundreds and hundreds of cookbooks that you can sort of browse in milliseconds. So this is something I see as just being another great tool in the kitchen – it just happens to be virtual tool,” he said. “Pretty much all of the great advances of cooking also coincide with technological advances, whether it’s better ovens, better blenders, better knives, and this flows in that continuum of technology aiding the cooking process.”

Try out some of the recipes from the cookbook below, or go to IBMChefWatson.com to browse the database.

Swiss-Thai Asparagus Quiche
Indian Turmeric Paella
Kenyan Brussels Sprouts
New Amsterdam Apple Pudding
Plum Pancetta Cider
Corn in the Coop
Hoof-n-Honey Ale