Belgian Bacon Pudding. A recipe from IBM’s Watson SuperComputer.

At a recent event with IBM at The Griffin, the Incogvino JHB team got to experience some cognitive cooking (and human wine pairings). The recipe below was generated by Watson, IBM’s SuperComputer.

Inputs used to generate this recipe:

• Primary ingredient: Bacon
• Primary style: Belgian
• Unique recipe, never seen before.

Pairs with: We don’t know! The Chef changed this course because he just didn’t “get” the flavours. Thankfully we forced him to bring out his trial dishes. Tres #YUM! What pairs with bacon?

Belgian bacon and porcini mushroom pudding

500ml cream

110g bacon: rendered, fat reserved

porcini mushroom powder: 2 teaspoons

ground black pepper: 1/4 teaspoons

granulated sugar: 3/4 cup

egg yolks: 2

sheet gelatin : 4 pieces, in cold water

500ml buttermilk

unsalted butter: 7 tablespoons

almond flour : 1/2 cup, finely ground

all-purpose flour: 1/2 cup

fine sea salt: pinch, more as needed

Icing sugar,: 1 1/4 cup, more as needed

large egg whites: 4

extra virgin olive oil : 2 tablespoons

orange: juice and zest of one

honey: 1 tablespoon

ground cumin : pinch

ground caraway: pinch

golden raisins: 1/2 cup

dried figs: 1/2 cup, stem tips removed and roughly chopped

Method

Make the bacon-porcini pudding, gently heat the cream to approximately 65˚C; add the warm rendered bacon and fat and infuse for at least 4-6 hours, chilled. After infusing, strain the cream and discard the bacon and congealed fat solids. Add the mushroom powder and black pepper and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, whisk together the sucrose and egg yolks. Temper the hot cream into the yolk mixture and return to low heat, cooking just to 85˚C Remove from heat and add the gelatin. Temper the mixture into the buttermilk and blend well with an immersion blender. Divide into glasses or serving dishes and chill to set.

Next, prepare the walnut financier. Gently cook the butter to a light brown color and reserve warm. Combine the dry ingredients; in another large mixing bowl, manually whip egg whites just until frothy and yellow color dissipates. Whisk in the flour mixture

Slowly whisk in the warm butter, followed by the olive oil, ensuring complete emulsification;chill. Divide the mixture into silicon baking molds; bake at 150˚C until lightly browned and cooked through. Cool and break the financier into small pieces.

To prepare the spiced fruit compote, combine the orange juice and zest, honey and spices and gently warm. Pour the orange-honey mixture over the raisins and figs and macerate several hours, chilled.

To assemble, divide the dried fruit mixture among each set pudding and top with the torn financier pieces. Garnish with a few grains of Maldon salt and a dusting of icing sugar.

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The Chef at The Griffin telling the story of what it’s like to get his instructions from a computer…

You may remember when Watson won Jeopardy.

From Wikipedia:

Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,[2] developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM’s first CEO and industrialist Thomas J. Watson.[3][4] The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy![5] In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.[3][6] Watson received the first place prize of $1 million.[7]

Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage[8] including the full text of Wikipedia,[9] but was not connected to the Internet during the game.[10][11] For each clue, Watson’s three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game’s signaling device, but had trouble responding to a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.

Enter Watson’s next trick. It can cook. Which led to a fascinating experience… First of all, pairing wine to a bunch of recipes generated by a computer must have been interesting in itself, but probably the most interesting part of “Dining with Watson” was how hard it was for the Chef (in this case from The Griffin in Illovo) to put together these dishes. Some of them went against every trained cooking bone in his body. And yet… they tasted great!

Watson’s recipe generation repertoire is generated off a couple of factors.

• Primary ingredient
• Primary style (eg. Indian, Spanish etc.)
• Should the recipe be completely unique

Unique recipes is where it gets a bit crazy. Combinations of ingredients and styles that never, ever would make sense in your head. But I guess that’s the fun bit. And how you end up with Swiss Thai Quiche… or Belgian Bacon Pudding.

I’m going to post each recipe separately, but definitely have a look at the wine pairing below. Then follow the links below and try your hand at some computer generated cooking. Let us know how it goes!

IBM Watson’s recipe for Swiss Thai Quiche

IBM Watson’s recipe for Deboned Loin of Lamb with Pinenut Crust

IBM Watson’s recipe for Belgian Bacon Pudding

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