DIGITAL RECIPES

Be it Amazon's Alexa walking you through recipes, your oven suggesting what you should cook or baking in real-time with friends online, the way we discover recipes is changing. First you asked mum, then you bought cookbooks, but now online hubs such as bbcgoodfood.com enable you to browse thousands of recipes in seconds using key filters (ingredient, diet, season etc.). ‘Whether it’s offline in-app access to favourite recipes or quick inspiration videos on Facebook, we make sure people can get what they want conveniently,’ says BBC Good Food’s Hannah Williams.

That thirst for convenience explains why – imagine: your hands are covered in eggs and flour – voice-control will be the next big thing. Experian found 51% of US users keep their Amazon or Google voiceassistant in the kitchen and you can now ‘ask Alexa’ to talk you through

60,000 recipes. Bosch is developing the voice-activated kitchen helper, Mykie. ‘It can project recipes onto walls and connect you with other users, perhaps in another country. Share a recipe and it’ll guide you both,’ says group innovations manager, James Kington.

Most smart appliances have built-in cookbooks, accessible via a screen or app. Next, fitted cameras will constantly monitor cupboard and fridge contents and – prompted by compatible ingredients or use-by dates (you can already do this manually with the Eat By app (eatbyapp.com)– suggest suitable recipes. ‘Even if the label’s the wrong way round, you can now train systems to identify items by packaging,’ says Craig Wills, managing director at product design studio, Hi Mum! Said Dad. That artificial intelligence, the ability of machines to recognise ingredients and learn how they work together, is potentially explosive.

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Pic2recipe team fed one million recipes and food images into a device that can already identify individual ingredients/dishes and provide recipes for them with around 20% accuracy.

Soon you will be able to photograph a restaurant dish and instantly pull down recipes for it. Will that change what we eat? ‘It’s thrilling,’ cautions Williams, ‘but we’re creatures of habit. Every Sunday, the most viewed recipe on bbgoodfood.com is Yorkshire pudding.’

Fitted cameras will constantly monitor fridge contents and suggest suitable recipes