![]() Through a combination of software and hardware - as in basic kitchen equipment that’s been souped up with sensors and cameras - CloudChef can record someone cooking a dish one time, then turn around and produce what the company calls “a machine-readable recipe file.” The data capture not only includes video, but also information from infrared and thermal sensors, scales, and other equipment that allows the software to measure temperature and weight. Because there’s minimal additional hardware required to run CloudChef’s software, the company says it could retrofit existing cloud kitchens for use. Aside from a dry pantry where barcodes replace pieces of painter’s tape with ingredient names scrawled across them, and the addition of desktop computer-sized monitors next to the hulking industrial range, there’s not much that separates a CloudChef kitchen from any other. Stepping inside the company’s Palo Alto kitchen, it’d be relatively easy to overlook the technological enhancements that differentiate this commercial kitchen from any other. In a way, the execution might not be as complicated as you’d think. “Our problem statement was: We need to codify the intuition of the chef,” Abraham says. In the view of CloudChef CEO Nikhil Abraham, the company’s product aims to simulate the kind of kitchen instincts that can take talented cooks and chefs years to perfect. A new Silicon Valley startup called CloudChef is using software and artificial intelligence to digitize cooking - not recipes, but the actual process of preparing specific dishes. In short: Good cooking requires good instincts in the kitchen. But whichever side of the fence they land on, for the most part, food people agree that the ability to produce delicious things requires a relatively high level of perception - the capacity to recognize when a pan of caramelizing onions reaches the perfect shade of auburn or to smell when roasting vegetables teeter across the line between underdone and just right. Cooks, chefs, and enthusiastic diners have long debated whether cooking is an art or a craft, a form of creative expression or the deft execution of learned skills.
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