Bengali Butternut BBQ Sauce recipe - with volume amounts

[dronon]

After Watson played Jeopardy, the developpers at IBM decided to turn their computer protégé's attention to... cooking! It recently came up with a concoction they called Bengali Butternut BBQ Sauce, but all the ingredients were listed by weight. I tried making it the other day, and so I present my modified version with approximate volumes for the

Comments

[ungulata]

It's a sauce... so perhaps that is why there's so much lemon. ^_^ A machine concocts a recipe that is both expensive and has ingredients that are difficult to find... not too surprising. 8^D

[plonq]

I am not surprised that an algorithm would give the measures in weights, rather than volume, since the former is a more accurate - especially for dry ingredients whose density can change with temperature, humidity and the like.

I ended up buying a kitchen scale when I started looking up more recipes online, because many of the ones from Europe gave their measures as grams.

I am mildly amused by this:

>2/5 cup rice vinegar

So you don't have a good scale, but you have an apparatus that measures fifths of a cup. Anyway, that is secondary.

>1/4 tsp fresh lemon rind (packed)*
>1 Tbsp fancy mollases*

You put asterisks as if to suggest there would be footnotes further down in the entry, but there were not footnotes. Were you just messing with us?

As a personal aside, I have probably ruined many recipes because of it, but I only buy blackstrap molasses and use it even when a recipe calls for the fancy stuff. It is more robust and flavourful, and a little less sweet than the lighter varieties.

[dronon]

Yep, I know the advantage of weight-based recipes, and I have a kitchen scale, but the whole point of this post was to provide approximate volume equivalents. I made a double recipe using my scale, looked at the volumes, and divided by two.

Asterisks: First paragraph, last sentence: "Anything marked with an asterisk means I changed the suggested amount." Further down: "I also added more mollases." I use fancy mollases many because it's easy to pour (especially when the container is over half-empty) and to clean up afterwards. It is just so, so much easier to work with. Flavour be damned when it comes to molasses, IMO, I prefer the ease of the fancy type.

"2/5 cup" - Well, it ended up weighing about the same as water, so 100g would have become 100 mL, except none of the other mesurements are in mL, and "0.423 cups" sounds anal, so I rounded it down to 2/5 of a cup, since changing the whole recipe to volume amounts meant things weren't going to be exactly the same anyway.

[atara]

>Flavour be damned

...then why bother cooking anything at all, and just consume Soylent instead?

[dronon]

...Are you kidding me with that comment? The flavour needs to be close enough; the minor differences aren't going to transform the dish in a huge way. I'll substitute blackstrap with fancy molasses, no issue; but I wouldn't replace it with marine algae or bananas. When I say flavour be damned, it's "robust and flavourful" that I'm rejecting between two kinds of the same thing. Sheesh.

[cjthomas]

Interesting and nifty!

The biggest "machine signature" I noticed was that it picked awkward volumes. I'm not sure how much of this was the original recipe vs your conversion of the weights. Human-made recipes tend to tweak both individual quantities and the total recipe yield to get whole numbers or very simple fractions for as many measurements as possible.

There are a handful of recipes that I make algorithmically, but the result usually ends up being more of a template ("X flavoured pudding") than a continuum ("40%/60% on the pudding/custard axis"). What exactly was Watson trying to optimize for when inventing new recipes? Or were they just using it as a search engine/amalgamation engine to pull up variants of existing recipes?

[dronon]

I get the impression Watson was looking for combinations, things that seemed to go with each other, and avoiding things that tended not to be found together - I'm guessing it then was given a general class of recipe (sauces) and then tried to apply the patterns within those restrictions?

So instead of tomato you end up with butternut squash; instead of brown sugar you get lemon, molasses and dates; vinegar becomes a combo of vinegar, wine and water, and so on.

[pierrekrahn]

I'm way too lazy to try anything like this at all, but I am fascinated with the concept of computer-generated recipes :)

[dronon]

Well, here are some other concoctions of Watson's, although I think these were partially tweaked by some actual human chefs:
http://www.bonappetit.com/tag/chef-watson-recipes