🍳NYT Cooking Adds AI Assistant That Rewrites Recipes for iOS Subscribers

Your recipe app can now swap ingredients for you

NYT Cooking just shipped an AI assistant, and it's more useful than you'd expect. Subscribers on iOS can type into a small box on any recipe page, hit the prompt "Customize this recipe…", and get a brand-new version back. The original stays put. Why should you care? Because this is a clean example of an LLM doing a narrow job well. It was trained on user comments, so its advice reflects what home cooks actually ran into. It pushed back on bad ideas too. It told one user that minced beef can't stand in for ladyfingers in a trifle, and it refused to just agree with crazy requests. The details are practical. It swapped Thai basil for cilantro, warned that cayenne swapped for chile "brings significant, sharp heat," and suggested shorter browning for chicken tenders. It also converts metric weights to US measurements and suggests equipment swaps. Alexa Plus on the Echo Show 11 gave similar substitution advice, but it could only describe the changes while showing the original recipe on screen. Watch whether NYT expands beyond iOS. Launch was iOS only, and that's where the subscriber base is most engaged right now.