AI Cooking Coach (Process Debrief)
Research into a cooking coach that reads probe logs and step times, then tells you why a batch went wrong.
- Idea
- Research
- Building
- Live
- Done
This started as “what if a camera and a probe thermometer could coach you through a recipe?” and turned into something narrower. The interesting part isn’t watching you cook. It’s the debrief afterwards: looking across many batches and finding the cause that keeps coming back.
The write-up on how I got here is in What If the Debrief Is the Product?.
Where It Stands
- Market research: done. 12 segments researched, each one checked by a second pass told to refute it. 47 ideas went in, and the survivors were scored and ranked.
- Cooling Debrief demo: done, on generated data. It scores commercial cooling logs against the Food Code cooling rules and drills into why batches failed.
- Video step timing: in progress. Early tests say it only works for long steps.
Demos
The two demo pages are getting a cleanup pass and will go up here when they’re ready.
What’s Next
Testing whether a real person in food service can find the planted problems in the Cooling Debrief in ten minutes, with no hints. If they can’t, the page isn’t doing its job yet.
The Rule Behind the Cooling Debrief
- Ice bath, shallow pans: 63°F
- Deep stockpot in the walk-in: 90°F
Curves are illustrative: Newton's law of cooling toward a 36°F walk-in, not measured batches.