Robots, Flan, and Apple Pie

The Serious Eats staff is an eclectic group of folks with all differing interests outside of their day job. Amanda loves watching a foreign film screening or Philadelphia sports, Tess is constantly in search for the perfect rotissierie chicken, Yasmine is training her bird Zippy to become a pirate—you get it. Not unrelated? All the below. Here’s the SE BTS from the week (and here are all existing previous installments of this silly column).

(What the Robots Understand to Be) Onions

We discovered that Daniel has been having hours-long conversations with ChatGPT after he signs off at work. About what, you might ask? I’d be so happy to tell you! They’re chatting about all sorts of things, but most pressing these past few days has been Daniel’s quest to find the mathematical equation behind chopping an onion perfectly. Take a peek at some of the screenshots below (and then ignore all those grids) (and go cut some onions for Nik Sharma’s newly published pigeon peas and squash recipe).

Baking Without Bakers Present

Leah and Genevieve are, hands down, our Serious Eats baking rock stars. However, Leah lives in Boston and Genevieve is on CURRENTLY mat leave (GY! WE MISS YOU SO MUCH!), so when it came time to shoot Leah’s new Pennsylvania Dutch Apple Pie recipe this week in the NYC studio, it was up to Daniel to pull it together for the photos.

After just two FaceTimes with Leah and only four instances of saying “I don’t bake” (…to any SE reader who gets this Martin Short SNL reference, you’re his new favorite audience member), the pie came out delicious and you can follow the recipe below.

Brain Worms This Week

In addition to the aforementioned outside-of-work pastimes, this staff spends a good chunk of its daytime hours talking at each other about our “brain worms.” In case you aren’t as far gone as we are, brain worms are pervasive thoughts that can only take over once you’ve ceded defeat to the internet; they allow you to know EVERY. SINGLE. DETAIL about an unimportant Internet Thing, which then becomes the only thing you think about for about 48 hours (and then never again). See: “brain rot,” “too online,” etc. Regardless, most of our brain worms are Thanksgiving-ish at this point.

Grace literally cannot stop making pumpkin-scented leche flans! Tess is mostly just curating recipe taxonomy pages so that you don’t all write in about how you can’t find Kenji’s oldest stuffing recipe. We are all looking forward to EOY brain worms, most of which, we pray, will be Mariah Carey-centric and have nothing to do with food science during regular business hours.