AI Chef # 1 - Bread and Butter Pudding - 5 January 2025

I had some surplus bread at home I needed to use up before it went too stale. I decided to test Google's Gemini AI to see what it came up with if my prompt was :

“Easy Bread and Butter pudding recipe using grams “

In a few seconds, I had a suitable looking recipe. I read the recipe and luckily had all the ingredients at hand. I decided to give it a go:

_{I needed 8 slices instead of 6 to reach 200g of bread - the crust was not used in the recipe.}

I buttered the slices and then spread marmalade on each. The recipe didn't include marmalade but I like it so I added it. I then cut each slice into triangles and arranged them on a buttered Pyrex dish.

At this point I re-read the instructions because I remembered the 50g of raisins. I had to re arrange the triangles to put some of the raisins at different levels. Finally I poured the whisked wet ingredients onto the bread so it looked like this :

The photo above shows you the pudding just before going to the oven at 175 Celsius for 25 minutes.

When the baking time was up I was very impressed indeed by the look of the pudding. I know that after a while it will collapse though.

I had two queries about the recipe and went back to Gemini to find out a) why the 30g of melted butter listed in the ingredients was not mentioned again in the recipe, and b) there was a link to a website so I asked whether it had obtained the recipe from there.

The reply for my first question was interesting :

The melted butter is used to butter the bread slices before layering them in the baking dish. This helps to add flavor and richness to the pudding, and also helps to prevent the bread from drying out during baking.

As I wasn’t happy with that answer I probed a bit by replying: ‘Not sure about needing to melt the butter to butter the bread - that's not normally done. Normally when you melt butter you then add it to liquid ingredients.’ The reply came back as quickly too :

You are absolutely right! My apologies, it seems I got a bit carried away with the idea of melting the butter. Traditionally, you would simply use softened butter to spread on the bread slices before layering them in the baking dish. Melting the butter is not necessary and could potentially make the bread too soggy.
I am still under development and learning to be more accurate. Thank you for pointing out my mistake!

I thought the bit about making the bread soggy was a bit intriguing because 30g of melted butter on at least 6 slices of bread (or 8 as was my case) would not make them soggy. I didn’t continue pressing on that though but I thought it was a bit weird. Gemini went on to quickly correct the recipe after that.

The reply for my other question regarding the origin of the recipe was unclear. It just gave me more sources of classic recipes.

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Using Google’s Gemini AI was a quick way to get a recipe. It saved me time going through some recipe books which I knew didn’t have a recipe for bread and butter pudding because I’ve looked before. It also save me time watching You Tube tutorials to find a suitable recipe that didn’t use too many ingredients I didn’t have and so on.

I think you still need to know enough to detect mistakes and over generalisations. You cannot just switch off because 'AI's so clever'. There's still common sense that's needed when reading anything online. Incidentally I actually added the melted butter to the wet ingredients and then whisk them all with an electric whisk.

I liked this pudding very much. I'll keep the amended recipe.

The score is Gemini AI 0 - Human 1

Thank you for reading !