Revamping Family Recipes with AI

In this post, I took a personal genealogical artifact – a family recipe for muffins – and converted it to modern methods and tastes using ChatGPT.

Old Family Recipes

I have an collection of old family recipes. They range the gamut from mac & cheese to lemon pie. And because I’m Chinese, there are recipes for steamed pork and potato, stir-fried beef and tomato, and joong (filled sticky rice dumplings). Today I was in the mood for my mother’s buttermilk bran muffins. I remember when I was a teenager, I had a group of friends staying for a sleep over. My mother made batch after batch of these muffins, feeding all of us hot, fresh, muffins slathered in butter until we couldn’t eat another bite.

I grew up on the coast, and since moving inland, I’ve never been able to replicate the baked goods I remember, which has been a continual source of frustration. This time I thought I’d try again using ChatGPT.

Have you ever read old recipes and wanted to update them? For myself, I convert all baking recipes to weight, not volume, and metric, not imperial. I’ve done this for my favourite bread and pancake recipes, painfully looking up each ingredient for conversion. Did you know that converting ingredients requires not only math (volume-based measures such as cups and teaspoons into weight-based measures such as pounds and kilos) but also the specific characteristics of the ingredient? Flour is not the same as salt, and white flour is not the same as rye flour. Baking is chemistry, and if you’re not a chemist, using AI can help.

My mother’s 1970s recipe for buttermilk bran muffins

Enter ChatGPT and my mother’s 1970s era recipe for buttermilk bran muffins. Look at this recipe. Let’s call it version one. My goodness. First of all, I want a batch of muffins, not to spend my afternoon in the kitchen in a production line. Who makes five dozen muffins? Secondly, I want to change all the pounds, cups, and tablespoons into grams.

My instructions to ChatGPT (5.4 Thinking) were (in order):

• Can you read this recipe and half its proportions? I checked the transcription was right, saw the awkward 1.5 egg measure, and said,
• Adjust to use one egg only, then
• I like dry measures by weight. Convert to weight measures, in metric, and use the internet to calculate the correct conversions because it’s not strictly math, and finally
• Double check the final recipe against the original to be sure the calculations are correct.

Note I didn’t do all the changes at once, and then I had Chat double check the final results against the original. Chat did its work and I baked the results. Call this batch version two.

The results

I said, Results: recipe made 16 muffins. Good soft crumb. However, there is a slight lingering taste of baking soda. Check the internet. Do modern day buttermilk bran muffins use this preparation?

In case you missed it, this was the magical part. I can do the math myself, from halving the recipe, to adjusting to one-third, to converting the ingredients from imperial by volume to metric by weight, but I get shaky when I’m working with an old method and outdated proportions. I know how to bake but I don’t know the history of baking.

Chat said,

When scaling down the old family buttermilk bran muffin recipe and baking it as written, the muffins produced a soft crumb and a modest rise, but they also carried a slight lingering baking-soda taste, which aligns with modern baking advice that excess soda can leave an aftertaste if the batter does not contain enough acid to fully neutralize it. Current bran muffin recipes still use buttermilk and bran, but they generally rely on a more restrained balance of leaveners—often combining baking powder with a smaller amount of baking soda—rather than the heavier soda approach common in some older recipes. In other words, the family recipe still works, but modern baking practice suggests that reducing the soda is the best way to preserve the character of the muffins while bringing the flavour more in line with contemporary expectations.

And there you have it. I converted an old family recipe for five dozen muffins into 16 muffins as a first test batch. ChatGPT helped me figure out that too much baking soda is an issue, but altitude is not.

The updated recipe

Here is the adjusted recipe. Note it is untested and while I intend to test it, I make no promises as to the results.

Buttermilk Bran Muffins, v.3

Metric, 1 egg version — revised soda
Makes about 16 muffins

Ingredients

Dry

• 165 g white sugar
• 160 g flour
• 64 g unprocessed bran
• 5.3 g baking powder
• 1.5 g salt

Wet

• 76 g butter, melted and cooled slightly
• 1 egg
• 284 g buttermilk

Soda mixture

• 5 g baking soda
• 10 g boiling water

Optional

• Fruit

Method

1. Preheat oven to 220°C. Grease or line muffin tins.
2. In a large bowl, combine sugar, flour, bran, baking powder, and salt.
3. In a second bowl, beat the egg. Add buttermilk and melted butter and stir to combine.
4. In a small cup, dissolve the baking soda in the boiling water.
5. Stir the soda mixture into the wet ingredients.
6. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients all at once. Stir just until combined.
7. Fold in fruit, if using.
8. Fill muffin tins.
9. Bake for 15 minutes, then check. Continue if needed, up to 25 minutes maximum.
10. Cool on a rack.

Afterword

Genealogy encompasses all that life has to offer, and food is a big part of that journey. Food connects us to our roots viscerally, like a direct path to our memories. In this post I used AI to convert a fifty-year old recipe for muffins to modern day tastes and preferred baking methods. It’s not perfect yet but with AI, it has the chance to get there.

Thank yous

Thanks to my husband for his willingness to eat whatever I make, which gives me the freedom and permission to experiment.