Introducing DishGen – The Infinite AI-Powered Recipe Generator

Earlier this week, I posted a new recipe for Fettuccine with a Pineapple Cream Sauce. It’s super tasty. But I have a confession… that recipe wasn’t made by me, it was made by, well, a robot.

As you probably know, we’re currently in the midst of an AI-revolution. These AI tools from MidJourney, OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, Google, and countless others are getting extremely good at writing text and generating images – and they are improving at light speed. Given my background as a web app developer and food blogger, my first question was whether they could generate recipes as well, and I found that with some clever prompting and back-end work, the answer is a resounding yes. AI can generate really amazing recipes.

I began to come up with a vision for a recipe website that would serve two equally powerful purposes 1) allow users to enter a meal idea and get back a fully-functional recipe, and 2) catalog these AI-created recipes in a user-friendly format so that they could be saved, searched, and discovered by other users in a massive collection. Over the last few months, I have been working to make this vision a reality and today I’m excited to introduce DishGen.com – the infinite AI-powered recipe generator.

In fact, I just made a video that goes over this project if you’d prefer to watch –

[P.S. This video is from my YouTube channel which covers the space between art and technology. It’s not a cooking specific channel, but I’m working on a lot of new content on those topics, so if you’re into that kind of thing, please subscribe.]

As a recipe developer, building this tool was both exhilarating and terrifying. Over many years, I managed to generate about 350 recipes. With AI, I can create hundreds of recipes in an hour. In fact, this project hasn’t even officially launched but already over 1,000 recipes have been created in the last week! Together, the amount of great recipes we’ll be able to create and save on DishGen is truly staggering.

How it Works

DishGen is a free service. You can access it at DishGen.com and you don’t even need to sign up to try it out right now. Though, I highly recommend you create a free account – it gives you a much larger monthly search quota and allows you to bookmark the recipes you create.

Right from the homepage, you can use the input box to simply type in anything. There’s a ton of rotating suggestions on the homepage. You can try things like “A high-protein vegan breakfast smoothie with antioxidants” or “No-bake keto peanut butter cookie bites with flaxseed” or “A crowd-pleasing vegetarian entree for my potluck this weekend” – the possibilities are endless.

The recipe you get back will be 100% AI-generated. It’s not searching the internet to find results or copying and pasting other content, it’s truly generating a new recipe on command. It also writes a title, short description, and tags that fit the recipe. It’s kind of surreal.

Sometimes, it may not be what you were looking for, but that’s fine. It’s not perfect. You can refine your prompt to be more specific and try again until you get it exactly right.

Tips for Getting Better Results

Like all new tools, there could be a bit of a learning curve to get the best results, so here are a few tips to get the most out of DishGen –

1. Be Specific. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that this is not a search engine like we’re all used to. I’ve noticed that a lot of early users have been typing in generic prompts with one word or ingredient. “curry” or “chocolate” will get you nowhere. The more detailed your prompt, the more likely you are to get a recipe that fits your vision. I think of it like a chef that will make me anything I want. If I just say “potatoes” I’m probably not going to get something as great as if I was more detailed.
2. Include Ingredients. Ask for the ingredients you want the recipe to contain. You can search for multiple ingredients at once by separating them with a comma. I use this to find creative recipes for items I already have in my kitchen to reduce waste.
3. Ask for Constraints. You can include things like “with less than 10 ingredients” or “keto friendly” or “for picky eaters” or “that makes 6 servings” to return a more specific result.
4. Mash up cultures and ideas. I’ve had a lot of good results with things like “a dish that feels Italian but includes Hawaiian ingredients” so feel free to be adventurous and see what happens!

There’s also an advanced recipe generation page which guides you through the process to get even more accurate results.

DishGen is a Community

As cool as it is to generate recipes, I don’t see that as this platform’s primary feature. Instead, the real power of DishGen is its ability to catalog a near-infinite array of recipes. For this reason, I put a ton of emphasis on features that allow users to search, filter, bookmark, rate, comment on, and post photos of these recipes.

With such a large volume of data, the most critical part of this platform is having users who not only generate recipes, but make the recipes and report back to give them a rating, leave comments, and upload photos. that data can then be processed and the best recipes can rise to the top. In the not-too-distant future, I suspect we’ll have a staggering collection of amazing recipes that is freely accessible by anyone.

With that in mind, I wanted to make this a free service for everyone because the more all of us use it and report back on the recipes, the better it will be for everyone. The only limitation currently is that accounts do have monthly “credits” that limit the number of recipes that can be generated. This is necessary because it is cost/resource intensive to access these AI tools. However, I am quickly working on a reward system that will allow users to earn permanent quota increases by trying the recipes they generate and providing comments and photos.

I’m not sure where this AI recipe revolution is headed, but this is just the beginning. I’m hopeful that DishGen can make cooking faster, easier, healthier, less wasteful, and more successful for home cooks around the world – it’s really an extension of the One Ingredient vision that has been here all along. It’s a pretty exciting time!

If you have any questions about this tool, you can post them below. The service is also in beta and I’m sure there will be some bugs and glitches. If you do find anything unusual or have issues, please do report them via the DishGen Contact page.

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DishGen Created the Best Vegan Cookie Recipe I’ve Ever Made

Okay! So this tool can generate lots and lots of recipes but the question is, are they any good?

A true story – this week, I was looking for a killer vegan cookie recipe. I don’t make a lot of dessert and I don’t have a great crispy cookie recipe, like a sugar cookie, so I simply asked DishGen for a vegan cookie that is crispy and has no processed sugar and it came back with this – Crispy Almond Butter Vegan Cookies.

This recipe seemed to make sense and I had all the ingredients, so I immediately got up and made it on the spot. I just followed along exactly and had the cookies in the oven within 8 minutes.

No joke, these are the best cookies I’ve ever made. Everything was perfect. It nailed the quantities of ingredients, the batter had just the right consistency, just the right amount of baking powder for a tiny rise, and they came out crispy on the outside and a little softer and melty on the inside. Though it’s mostly almonds, it’s just slightly nutty and so delicious. It even nailed the number of servings. Amazing.

As a recipe developer, this was a surreal experience for me. It would have taken me infinite attempts to come up with something like this, and I probably would have never stumbled on the almond butter + almond flour combo that worked so well.

These cookies do have a stupendous amount of fat and some coconut oil which I wouldn’t normally use, but you’ll have to take that up with the robots 🤖.

Makes: 16 cookies

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F and line a baking tray with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together almond flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. In another bowl, whisk together almond butter, maple syrup, coconut oil, and vanilla extract.

4. Mix wet ingredients into dry until well-combined and dough forms.

5. Use a cookie scoop to portion dough and roll into balls, then flatten into discs.

6. Arrange on the baking tray and bake for 12-14 minutes, until lightly golden.

7. Cool for 5 minutes on the tray then move to a wire rack for further cooling.