Swiss Thai Quiche, 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: Asparagus
• Primary style: Swiss & Thai
• Unique recipe, never seen before.

Pairs with: Jordan Unoaked Chardonnay 2014

Swiss Thai Quiche. A recipe from IBM’s Watson.

155g Butter: divided

82ml Water: divided

2 Egg Yolk: divided

1.5 tsp salt: divided

225g plain flour: sifted

115g Lemongrass: peeled, tender white part only, thinly sliced

115g Leeks:, white part only

25 Asparagus tips: SHORT ONE

3 Eggs

225ml Heavy Cream

225 ml Plain whole-milk yogurt

Mild Curry Powder: 3/8 tsp

Method

Make the pastry dough, place the flour in the bowl of an electric mixer fit with the paddle attachment. Add 1 tsp of salt, 1 egg yolk, and 2.5 oz of water, and mix over low speed. Make sure your butter is room-temperature, and add it, diced, continuing to mix until homogeneous. Take the dough out of the bowl and knead by hand for 1 minute. Shape into a ball, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Lightly grease the tart molds. Roll the pastry dough to 1/16” thick, into a rectangle of approximately 14” x 16”. Cut out 14 discs of 4” diameter each, and fit them into the tart molds. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the quiche filling: Melt 2/3 of the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, then sauté the sliced lemongrass and leeks with a dash of salt until soft, stirring regularly. Let cool. Melt 1.5 oz of butter in a saucepan over medium heat, then add 0.4 oz of water and asparagus, season with a dash salt, and cook for a couple of minutes until the asparagus is cooked but still crunchy. Let cool. In a bowl, mix the eggs, 1 egg yolk, heavy cream, curry, coriander, pepper and ¼ tsp of salt. Fold in the yogurt, the sautéd lemongrass and leek, and crumbled feta

Pour the quiche mixture into the molds, arrange 2 asparagus tips on top of each of them, and sprinkle with the grated Gruyère. Bake in a 400º F / 205º C oven for about 30 minutes, until golden brown.

Serve warm with some chopped parsley sprinkled on top.

The post Swiss Thai Quiche. A recipe from IBM’s Watson #CognitiveCooking appeared first on Incogvino.

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

The post IBM’s Watson can cook (quite well actually)… appeared first on Incogvino.