At the Smart Kitchen Summit in October, celebrity chef Tyler Florence made a bold statement. “Recipes are dead,” he told the Seattle audience. “They’re dead the same way paper maps are dead.” It’s shocking to hear, especially from someone who has penned 16 successful cookbooks and another 20,000 recipes for the Food Network.
Until now, he explained, recipes have been one-dimensional, top-down dictations of a single dish. Home chefs don’t learn actual skills from recipes to push them forward in the kitchen, or how to customize dishes for dietary restrictions or preferences. And in an era where we now tweak everything from our Starbucks orders to our poke bowls, customization is a must.
With that in mind, Florence teamed up with Innit, a Redwood City, Calif., start-up, to create an app that he calls the kitchen equivalent of GPS. Launched in December, Innit provides personalized meal recommendations, customizable, video-based, guided cooking instructions and smart appliance connectivity to do things like preheat your oven. Someday, it might be able to suggest foods based on your blood type or genetics.
For now, every meal in the app – organized into simple categories, like Tacos and Wraps, Grain Bowls, Pastas, Chicken or Adaptive Roasts – comes with calorie counts and can be customized 200 ways, which results in a total of 5,000 meals. The company hopes to double that number by the end of the year.
When I made Thai Green Curry Tofu with Broccoli & Sweet Potatoes, the app let me adjust the number of servings and substitute Brussels sprouts, which I had on hand, for the broccoli. It showed me step-by-step videos, so I could see how thin to slice the sweet potatoes and how to evenly coat and season all sides of a tofu block (you flip as you go).
I could have swapped the protein, starch and sauce, too, and it would have updated my recipe with a how-to video for every change I made. Intelligent sequencing ensured all parts of my meal got to the table at almost the same time.
At home, we’re trying to eat less chicken and carbs. Vary our veggies. Get around my husband’s lactose sensitivity. But you might tell Innit that you’re on the Paleo Diet, for example, have a nut allergy or simply dislike olives. When I plugged our preferences into the app it spewed out permutations of meals, along with the updated videos in real-time.
So, Pineapple Beet Chicken Arepa became Pineapple Beet Flank Steak Lettuce Wraps. I could have changed the pineapple beet salsa to mango or Thai cucumber, and the sunflower sprouts in the Crunch category to red cabbage or jicama. But I thought this one looked and sounded good. It ended up tasting good, too.
I’m still playing with the app, which is free and available on iOS and Android. I have yet to enable Google Assistant for voice-activated instruction or try one of the new meal kits that Innit launched this month with Chef’d. And I don’t have a smart refrigerator yet. But by the time I do, this app may very well be able to tell me what’s in it.
Contact Jessica Yadegaran at jyadegaran@bayareanewsgroup.com.
