In an aside in the New York Times Cooking video I watched recently, where Melissa Clark made her lemony white bean soup with turkey and greens, the food reporter and recipe columnist invited viewers to leave a comment telling her what they do with the kale stems. It highlighted this sweet, funny relationship between a media brand’s personalities and its audience, a warm-casual vibe.
I am not among the multitudes in the Cooking section's commenter army, but a few days later I was very surprised to see some of them in open revolt. I was even more surprised to see why: In an iOS-only beta, the Times is now using AI to allow subscribers to modify recipes.
Below the article announcing the change on October 23, commenters loudly aired their grievances, threatening to cancel subscriptions, asking who wanted this, and how to turn it off.
After four days and 172 almost exclusively angry comments, commenting for the story was turned off.
The Times doesn't share Cooking's subscriber numbers, but NYT executive communications director Jordan Cohen said the site and app were visited 514 million times in 2025, and its YouTube channel has over 1.4 million subscribers. Reading over the section's AI plans and thinking about how many bungled attempts I'd seen to mush technology into places where it doesn't need to be in the kitchen, I guessed that I would side with the commenters. Then I tried the new AI feature, and found that it worked surprisingly well.
My writing for WIRED over the past decade has shown me again and again that adding tech to a kitchen product is risky at best. I've repeatedly watched companies try and fail: Bluetooth connections for all the appliances, apps that lean too heavily on crummy recipes, toasters with optical sensors or touchscreens that still couldn't toast particularly well. Just about anything that was part of the "smart kitchen" tended not to be very smart at all.
Developing dependable, delicious recipes is hard, expensive work that can require a whole staff. Yet skimping can hurt the brand. Two notable companies with a deep bench—The New York Times Cooking and America's Test Kitchen—are cooking content makers. Recipes, which is to say delicious, high-quality, tested recipes, are what they do.
Since AI is often a lousy chef, giving it a role in the presentation of NYT's gold mine of content is a big risk.
Earlier this year, the Times allowed AI to help with a recipe-scaling feature (modifying ingredient quantities so "serves 4" turns into "serves 6") and converting from imperial measurements to metric—cups, tablespoons, and Fahrenheit to grams, milliliters, and Celsius. Now, in the iOS-only beta, a "customize this recipe" field appears just above the ingredient list.
If you want to make banana bread but tell it you don't have a loaf pan, it'll ask you what kind of pans you do have, then modify the recipe to suit. All the changes throughout the recipe are noted in a visible red-orange text. Over several days of testing, I saw how you can do relatively simple things like swap ground pork for ground beef, or make more complicated demands like asking it to tailor things to your dietary needs. The modifications it makes are very visible throughout the recipe. If you ask it for something too out there—like turning Eric Kim's gochujang buttered noodles into a cookie—it gives you a "hard redirect" and points you to a better-suited recipe, which in this case is Kim's gochujang caramel cookies.
"We put a lot of effort into trying to tell you when not to do something if it's no longer in the spirit of the recipe," says Camilla Velasquez, the general manager of NYT Cooking.
For its recommendations, the LLM looks at the recipe itself, the Times’ ingredient substitution guide, user comments, and then what it calls AI "drawing on our expertise," in that order. Velasquez says the AI should be a helper, not the main act, noting, "You shouldn't be chatting with it."
She explains that when the Times built the AI functionality, recipe editors helped create the original rule set, then evaluated how it worked at the end.
When I ask what this means for the jobs of 60 editors, writers, video journalists, and other employees—the team that creates the recipes people use and curates the vibe readers relate to—Velasquez stresses that NYT Cooking has been "hiring more than ever" and that it has "zero intention of publishing fewer recipes."
So far, she says people are mainly using it for ingredient and equipment substitutions, along with adjusting recipes for dietary needs. "Some people use the chatbot to scale, or they'll scale to match an ingredient," giving the example of someone who had only one cup of oil for a recipe that needed more.
As a food writer whose career has taken some substantial turns due to AI recently, I wouldn't say I've been clamoring for this, but I find the Times’ measured approach works pretty well.
I started testing it out by making chicken and dumplings using a five-star Alison Roman recipe with more than 6,000 ratings. I asked the AI tool to swap out bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs for boneless, skinless breasts. It thought about it for a moment—"simmering" in AI Cooking patois—and then offered up "Chicken Breast and Dumplings," with the "breast" in the title rendered in the red-orange color that indicates a modification. Just below the title, it said it was "Joseph's version made with AI. Not tested or endorsed by the original recipe's creators." Along with those visible changes, I could also toggle back and forth between my version and the original.
Once I started cooking, things went smoothly. I'm a recipe follower, not an improviser, and the Times’ recipes are easy to follow. The modifications were too. I was also impressed by how the app flagged that the chicken breast simmering time would be reduced because it cooks faster than thighs, and since they don't render as much fat as skin-on thighs do, it added some butter to the roux. These changes were incorporated into the right places in the recipe.
It all made sense except for one bit. It suggested the shredded, cooked breast go back into the pot for about another 30 minutes while the sauce thickens and the dumplings cook. I saw this coming and, well, I wasn't going to do that to my dinner. I put a handful of shredded meat in as directed so I could see what happened and reserved the rest. The shredded bits that were in for that extra half hour weren’t bad per se, but their texture was notably less succulent than what I'd reserved and way less than thighs would be.
This was the largest issue I encountered in all of my testing. If I had been the creator of the Times' original recipe, I'm not sure how I'd feel about the option to use a breast instead of thighs, which is not unheard of, but not very common in classic chicken and dumpling recipes. Perhaps it's something that could be fine-tuned or simply not offered as an option.
From there, it was fairly smooth sailing. I had it turn a Francis Lam roasted mushroom and broccoli grain bowl into a roasted mushroom, cauliflower, and squash grain bowl. The crucifer crisscross was an easy one-to-one, but I also told it to add a pound of delicata squash. It had me slice the squash into half moons so everything would finish at the same time, then upped the total amount of olive oil. Lam's poetic voice was preserved in both versions of the recipe, telling you to heat the olive oil "until it slips around the pan like water" before adding beaten eggs for festive dish-topping egg ribbons. My buddy Dave had come by for cribbage night, and this made for an enjoyable, healthy, pregame dinner before he went on to skunk me twice.
I'd been curious how it would handle batters, and it capably transformed Yewande Komolafe’s Toasted Sesame and Scallion Waffles into a yeasted version, which, unlike the original, gets an overnight in the fridge, letting the active dry yeast get bubbly and add an appealing tang.
A friend suggested Colu Henry's pasta and chickpea stew. I swapped canned diced tomatoes I had in my pantry for whole, and asked it to "add more vegetables." It gave options in line with the recipe—carrots, celery, onion, zucchini, mushrooms, and extra greens—then put what I chose into the right spots throughout the procedure so everything went in at the right time. It made for a healthy, hearty dinner.
Having been to the Portland Fermentation Festival recently and wanting guidance on incorporating a few extra ingredients, particularly garlic, into my sauerkraut, I used the AI to modify Lidey Heuck's original, saying "add carrots, garlic, and kale," which it suggested grating, thin slicing, and mincing, respectively, all in the right-feeling proportions. It also added more salt, since I was making more kraut. The big jar is sitting next to me as I type, and while it's several days from being ready, a sniff test tells me it's on its way to being a good batch.
Finally, I turned Sue Li's peanut noodles with spicy tofu into peanut udon with tofu, whitefish, and cucumber. I started by asking it to make the original less spicy, add veggies, and "keep the tofu," but add some good-looking rockfish I found at the grocery store. Impressively, since the fish was an add-on, it had me cook it, then set it aside and wipe out the pan (!) before cooking the tofu. Since I swapped udon for the original bucatini, it customized the noodle-cooking guidance, too.
It seems pretty natural that the Cooking section ran into some resistance when launching this feature. The NYT employs some of the best recipe creators in the business. Using AI to help us make substitutions is helpful, and the way the app integrates those changes into the recipes is impressive, but this tinkering with the original is essentially a subtractive process. How many of us are going to make substitutions and land on something better than Melissa Clark, Yewande Komolafe, or Francis Lam set out to make by design?
Instead, it's saving us a trip to the store, or helping us use something we have on hand, or making it gluten-free, serving as a good and rare example of how you can use technology to make a product incrementally better.
It also sounds like the commenters’ concerns have been heard. Velasquez let me know right away when we spoke that people will be able to hide the AI feature in the app if they want. The Times is also keeping the whole thing in iOS-only beta for now, and not saying when it would be available on other platforms.
That bond that you can see between the Cooking team and its users is a pretty sweet thing. Deep down, I'm guessing the upset Cooking commenters felt worried they were going to lose some of that human connection. I hope it never goes away.
Source: Wired
