Cooking at home, it is too easy to fall into a rut. As someone with a busy schedule, there are weeks when I cycle through the same three recipes, or all too often, the same recipe for days on end.
Hey, batch cooking is efficient. As quick as it is, I enjoy food, and it's easy to feel a bit dulled out by the same food every day. That's why I was intrigued when I stumbled upon a Google experiment called Food Mood.
Unlike standard recipe websites, Food Mood is a Google Arts & Culture experiment that attempts to combine two seemingly disparate cuisines into a recipe that might surprise you.
As a fan of world cuisine, that's right up my alley. And it's become my go-to tool when I need a spark of creativity in the kitchen.
Pick two cuisines and let AI do the rest Give simple inputs, get a full recipe
Food Mood isn't a conventional Google product. As an experiment, it's not available as an app, but that's okay. Instead, you'll find the app tucked away in the Labs section of Google Arts & Culture.
At first glance, you might even mistake it for a game because of the bright and colorful visuals instead of the usual long recipe lists found on similar websites.
The concept is beautifully simple and is intended as a showcase of Google's Gemini AI capabilities.
Coming to the app or service, the concept is beautifully simple and intended as a showcase of Google's Gemini AI capabilities.
You pick two cuisines, a dish type and the number of servings. That's it. The app then mashes these choices together to generate what it thinks is a recipe that would work. Fusion food, if you will.
You'll get a name, description, ingredients, cook time, and step-by-step instructions. I was rather surprised to see it go the whole way.
If you're feeling particularly lucky, there's a randomization option as well, where the app will create a brand-new recipe for you from two completely random countries. What could go wrong with that?
That said, I cannot count the number of times I've struggled to figure out what I wanted to eat, craved something unique. I'd totally give the random button a try.
Would I cook what it suggested? Not too sure about that. But hey, at least you'll get an accompanying AI-generated image that'll show you what you can expect.
Fusion recipes that usually make sense The power of Gemini
The recipes generated by Food Mood are powered by Google's Gemini model, which is the backbone of Google's entire generative AI push.
That means you're getting exceptionally powerful AI smarts here. Perhaps that has a role to play in driving up the feasibility of the recipe?
Regardless, in practice, this means that Food Mood can combine something as incompatible as Japanese and Mexican food into a dish that might just work.
Moreover, it's not just taking a single ingredient and calling it a day. Much as wasabi in a taco would be pretty darn nice, that would be too simple.
Instead, Food Mood respects the flavor profiles and cooking methods of both chosen cuisines and comes up with a way to make them work together. It's pretty cool.
Food Mood respects the flavor profiles and cooking methods of both the chosen cuisines and comes up with a way to make them work together.
So far, I've experimented with mixing Indian and Austrian cuisine, and some of the recommendations have been surprisingly interesting and rather good.
Take, for example, the apricot and potato salad that mixes Indian spices with a fairly traditional Austrian staple. The combo works really well.
Food Mood also recommended a spiced potato and apple strudel. Now, I'm not entirely sure about that, but take out the apple from the mix, and the potato-stuffed phyllo pastry could work pretty well as a dish.
A great source of inspiration, perhaps not instruction
Look, let's be honest. There are limits to Food Mood's capabilities. These recipes are not validated by chefs or kitchens. The cook times, temperatures, and even flavor combos can vary wildly when you actually get around to trying out a recipe.
Think of the output here as inspiration rather than instruction. The apps usually get the fundamentals right and pair up ingredients that should work together.
You'll even find helpful pro-tips, like a reminder to toast spices before adding them or suggesting a garnish.
One of my favorite features of Food Mood is its accessibility. It doesn't drop you into a range of options. Select two countries, portion size, and what kind of dish you're looking for, and the AI will handle the rest.
If a recipe turns out to be a hit, you can share it on your socials or via email. Or, you can use it to generate joke recipes, if you so choose.
Broadly speaking, Google Food Mood gets more right than wrong and fits well under the Arts & Culture umbrella while also giving you genuinely useful suggestions to find some inspiration for your daily cooking.
Definitely one to check out if you find yourself struggling to figure out what to cook next.
