Comment by goosejuice
17 hours ago
In terms of temp and time surely if you know enough to judge it's correctness, you would not need it in the first place? Code correctness is rather objective and easily testable. Cooking is rather subjective and only testable with great effort and time. I just checked 4 models on a 4lb pork shoulder in an oven. Flash was super off, suggesting you could pull at 145-150F for a sliced roast. Yeah, you could and it would fucking suck. The per lb time and total time also didn't add up. The others were better but varied. Only one (opus) thought to ask if it was bone-in. If you're very specific you could certainly have it aggregate a bunch of recipes to get a sense of what's close to a good answer, but ultimately it depends on what sources it chooses.
I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.
I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.
I recently roasted a 5lb leg of lamb. Temp was pretty obvious but I had never cooked meat this way so an idea on time is really useful. Google search is a disaster for this kind of question. And I guess I have never encountered a good general cook book that I feel comfortable building off of.
I think all the science of cooking ones are a good bet for generalist knowledge. Some of the more textbook like ones as well. The food lab and on food and cooking stand out, but there are many others. I'm not sure I'd classify them as cookbooks.
Food lab, for example, covers buying storing and cooking lamb + a guide for a 5-7lb boneless leg across 5 or so pages. Kenji goes through great lengths to build intuition. I'm sure larousse, which is more of an encyclopedia, covers lamb quite extensively but it's probably more terse.
The internet can be an excellent source, but like most things it depends on who is writing it down.