This AI chef is designing recipes based on your leftovers

The worst part of cooking isn’t the cleanup. It’s figuring out what the hell you’re going to do with that tin of pumpkin-pie spice you bought on a whim 3 years ago.

Enter Plant Jammer, a Denmark-based AI-powered app that dishes out recipes based on what you have lying around your kitchen.

Over 10k European households use it — and this spring, as lockdown lulled us all into a cooking-induced madness, downloads jumped 3x.

Plant Jammer started as a basic web-scraping tool

In an earlier version of the app, you’d enter the ingredients/spices you had on hand, and the AI tool would comb through existing recipes to find options.

Fresh off a €4m (~$4.7m USD) funding round, the app is now using AI to  whip up its own recipes from scratch.

Cherry tomatoes, leeks, and cinnamon might not seem like they go together — but the bot may be able to work something out.

There are just a few downsides

When a BBC reporter tried a Plant Jammer original recipe, her sweet-potato patties came out overcooked — and with a strong, er… oat flavor?

But Plant Jammer is ready to learn from mistakes like these.

After she finished cooking, the app asked her to submit feedback. An hour later, the instructions changed.