AI IN THE BAKERY KITCHEN?
American food manufacturer
Jeanette Harris would never
have put two teaspoons of
cardamom in a recipe for a
dozen biscuits.
The spice is strong, polarising and typically
22 JUNE 2018
associated with India and Asian
cooking, not gluten-free chocolate chip
biscuits. “Humans have internal biases
about these sorts of things, especially
cooks and bakers — we have these ideas that
these are the tried and true ways,” Harris says. Two
teaspoons of cardamom is not one of those tried
and true ways. But when an artificial intelligence
designed to optimise parts for airplanes and spaceships
told her two teaspoons of cardamom was the
right amount, she listened. “And it tasted delicious.”
Harris, who founded the Gluten Free Goat Bakery,
worked with Google’s AI research team at the
company’s Pittsburgh office and its chef to develop
a biscuit recipe using machine learning and artificial
intelligence. It was arguably one of the tastier applications
for Google’s Hypertune project, engineer
Daniel Golovin says. The thought to apply Google’s
AI technology to baking biscuits started one day as
employees sat around talking at lunch. Greg Kochanski,
a member of the team working on AI, worried
that the technology would develop with only applications
for large corporations, and leave behind small
businesses. He proposed finding a real-world, small
use for it…and the Google biscuit experiment was
born. The team first worked with John Karbowski, a
chef at Google who teaches cooking to employees.
Karbowski and the team began baking chocolate
chip biscuits using recipes devised by the AI. The
artificial intelligence works by using a relatively small
data set to create the optimal conditions based
on any number of parameters. For the chocolate
chip biscuits, the AI could determine the amount
of specified ingredients, the temperature and time
in the oven or other factors in the baking process.
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INTRODUCING
Bun and Roll equipment for through puts from 4,800 to 24,000
pieces per hour
• APEX Sigma Horizontal Mixers with batch sizes 90 kg to
360 kg
• APEX Accumax Accupan 400 Bun System of dividing,
rounding, proofing, sheeting, moulding and panning
• APEX HS20 Bulk Bun Packer with up to 20 pillow packs
per minute
• Turkington
• Tweedy
• Performance
Fluids
Lubricants
• AMF
• APV
• Baker Perkins
• Burford
• Dowson
For parts and service of industrial
bakery equipment from:
Bun and Roll equipment for through puts
from 4,800 to 24,000 pieces per hour
• APEX Sigma Horizontal Mixers with batch sizes 90 kg to 360 kg
• APEX Accumax Accupan 400 Bun System of dividing, rounding,
proofing, sheeting, moulding and panning
• APEX HS20 Bulk Bun Packer with up to 20 pillow packs per minute
• AMF
• APV
• Baker Perkins
• Burford
• Dowson
• Turkington
• Tweedy
• Performance
Fluids
Lubricants
Ph: 09 887 7105 | Cell: 021 0279 5257 | Email: tony@teabakerysys.com
FT480
The AI takes data from test batches of biscuits and
uses it to design the best batch. “You’re not going
to do this billions of times,” Golovin says of baking
batches of cookies. “The trick is to do this as few
times as possible.” Some biscuits concocted by
the AI were terrible — not enough butter, too much
chocolate. Some had orange extract and cayenne
pepper. Some were good. Google employees
taste-tested the biscuits, and their feedback was fed
into the AI to help it make better decisions about
the next batch. After many batches of biscuits —
Google’s kitchen has five ovens — the team landed
on the optimal, basic, chocolate chip cookie recipe.
But they weren’t done there. To challenge the AI,
the team went to Harris, whose bakery specialises
in gluten-free, vegan and soy-free treats. Harris
gave the team an unfinished, chocolate chip biscuit
recipe that she was developing. The AI took control
over four or five ingredients, including cardamom
and Szechuan pepper, the latter of which it decided
does not belong in chocolate chip biscuits and was
zeroed out of the recipe. The rest of the recipe
was left to Harris’ expertise. It took the AI about 60
batches of cookies to nail the recipe…not bad for a
computer starting from scratch, Harris says. Both
she and Karbowski say it was a bit unnerving to give
the AI control over some of the baking process and
decision making. “You have to kind of surrender to
how you as a baker or chef instinctually react when
we look at ingredients and just trust in the recipe
that the machine puts out,” Karbowski says. Neither
Harris nor Karbowski actively uses Google’s AI in
the kitchen, and they both say that the technology
may not be the most beneficial to their small-scale
operations, where test batches and tastings are
possible. Both could see artificial intelligence and
machine learning benefiting larger baking and cooking
operations. And neither is worried that artificial
intelligence is coming for their jobs. Instead, the
technology will help them do their jobs better, they
say. “AI brought into a kitchen — it’s a little scary at
first,” Karbowski says. “But it really expands your
mind.” Or at least, it can help you find the perfect
amount of cardamom for your cookies. This story
first appeared in the Tribune-Review in the US.
BAKING SPECIAL
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