research

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.

  1. Idea
  2. Research
  3. Building
  4. Live
  5. 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

Food Code 3-501.14Two clocks, two lines. Cooked food has to drop from 135°F to 70°F inside 2 hours, then reach 41°F by hour 6. Drag the slider to see where two typical batches stand.
The two-stage cooling rule with two illustrative batchesTemperature in Fahrenheit against hours since 135°F. The rule needs 70°F by hour 2 and 41°F by hour 6. The ice bath batch is at 63°F at hour 2 and 38°F at hour 6, so it passes. The deep stockpot batch is at 90°F at hour 2 and52°F at hour 6, so it fails both checks.41°70°100°135°0h1h2h3h4h5h6h2h: 70°6h: 41°
  • 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.

Write-Ups

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