I Used NYT Cooking’s New AI-Powered Recipe Modifier, and It’s Actually Pretty Good

Nov 8, 2026 7:00 AM

The New York Times has added a beta feature to its Cooking app that helps readers swap ingredients or adjust recipes to suit their needs. It mostly hits the mark.

Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images

In an aside in the New York Times Cooking video I watched recently, where Melissa Clark made her lemony white bean soup with turkey and greens, the food reporter and recipe columnist invited viewers to leave a comment telling her what they do with the kale stems. It highlighted this sweet, funny relationship between a media brand’s personalities and its audience, a warm-casual vibe.

I am not among the multitudes in the Cooking section's commenter army, but a few days later I was very surprised to see some of them in open revolt. I was even more surprised to see why: In an iOS-only beta, the Times is now using AI to allow subscribers to modify recipes.

Below the article announcing the change on October 23, commenters loudly aired their grievances, threatening to cancel subscriptions, asking who wanted this, and how to turn it off.

After four days and 172 almost exclusively angry comments, commenting for the story was turned off.

The Times doesn't share Cooking's subscriber numbers, but NYT executive communications director Jordan Cohen said the site and app were visited 514 million times in 2025, and its YouTube channel has over 1.4 million subscribers. Reading over the section's AI plans and thinking about how many bungled attempts I'd seen to mush technology into places where it doesn't need to be in the kitchen, I guessed that I would side with the commenters. Then I tried the new AI feature, and found that it worked surprisingly well.

Since AI is often a lousy chef, giving it a role in the presentation of NYT's gold mine of content is a big risk.

"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," says Camilla Velasquez, the general manager of NYT Cooking.