NYT Cooking tests an AI tool that rewrites its recipes for individual readers

The New York Times has added an AI feature to its Cooking app that rewrites a recipe to fit what the reader has, or what they cannot eat. It is an iOS-only beta. A "customize this recipe" field sits just above the ingredient list. The reader types a request, such as a different meat, a missing pan or a dietary restriction, and the app returns a modified version of the recipe with every change marked.

NYT Cooking sells tested recipes. Developing them is slow, expensive work done by a staff of specialists. The new feature hands one part of that work to a language model: adapting a finished recipe to a single kitchen. Wired tested it over several days and found that it mostly works.

What the feature does

The Times announced the change on October 23. Earlier this year it had already used AI for two narrower tasks: scaling ingredient quantities, so that "serves 4" becomes "serves 6", and converting imperial measurements and Fahrenheit to metric and Celsius.

The new tool goes further. According to Wired, if a reader wants to make banana bread without a loaf pan, the app asks which pans they do have and then adjusts the recipe. Changes appear in red-orange text throughout the ingredients and steps, including the title. A label under the title says the version was made with AI and is "Not tested or endorsed by the original recipe's creators." Readers can toggle between their version and the original.

Some requests are refused. When asked to turn Eric Kim's gochujang buttered noodles into a cookie, the tool gave what the Times calls a "hard redirect" and pointed to Kim's gochujang caramel cookies instead. "We put a lot of effort into trying to tell you when not to do something if it's no longer in the spirit of the recipe," Camilla Velasquez, general manager of NYT Cooking, told Wired.

The model draws on four sources, in this order: the recipe itself, the Times' ingredient substitution guide, user comments, and what the Times calls "drawing on our expertise." Velasquez said recipe editors helped write the original rule set and evaluated the system at the end. She said the tool should be a helper, not the main act: "You shouldn't be chatting with it." So far, she said, people mainly use it for ingredient and equipment substitutions and for dietary needs. Some use it to scale a recipe to match the amount of an ingredient they have on hand.

How it performed in testing

Wired's reviewer cooked six modified recipes. Asked to replace bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs with boneless, skinless breasts in an Alison Roman chicken and dumplings recipe, the tool shortened the simmering time and added butter to the roux to make up for the fat the thighs would have rendered. It also told the cook to return the shredded breast to the pot for about 30 more minutes. The reviewer tested a small portion that way and found it noticeably less succulent. That was the largest problem found in testing.

The other tests went smoothly. The tool turned Francis Lam's mushroom and broccoli grain bowl into a cauliflower and squash version, cut the added delicata squash into half moons so it would finish at the same time, and increased the olive oil. It converted Yewande Komolafe's sesame and scallion waffles into a yeasted batter rested overnight. It added carrots, garlic and kale to Lidey Heuck's sauerkraut and raised the salt for the larger batch. In a peanut noodle recipe by Sue Li, it had the cook prepare the added fish first, set it aside and wipe out the pan before cooking the tofu, and adjusted the noodle instructions for udon. Wired noted that the original authors' wording survived in the modified versions.

Readers pushed back

Commenters under the October 23 announcement threatened to cancel subscriptions and asked how to turn the feature off. After four days and 172 comments, almost all of them angry according to Wired, commenting on the story was closed.

The Times does not publish Cooking subscriber numbers. Jordan Cohen, the paper's executive communications director, told Wired the site and app were visited 514 million times in 2025, and the YouTube channel has more than 1.4 million subscribers. Velasquez said readers will be able to hide the AI feature. The Times has not said when the beta will reach other platforms.

What it means for work

The tool takes over a task that used to fall to readers, comment threads and the occasional email to a recipe writer: working out how a tested recipe changes when one ingredient, pan or diet changes. The Times built it from material its staff already produced, including the substitution guide and editor-written rules, so their expertise now runs at the scale of individual requests without their direct involvement in each one. The output is explicitly untested, which shifts responsibility for the result back to the cook and keeps the original recipe as the reference product. Asked about the roughly 60 editors, writers, video journalists and other staff behind Cooking, Velasquez said the team is "hiring more than ever" and has "zero intention of publishing fewer recipes." What stays open is how errors like the overcooked chicken breast get caught when no recipe developer has tested the version a reader actually cooks, and whether readers who pay for human-tested recipes will accept machine-made variants beside them.