If you’ve been following IBM’s Watson project and like food, you may have noticed growing excitement among chefs, gourmands and molecular gastronomists about one aspect of its development. The main Watson project is an artificial intelligence that engineers have built to answer questions in native language — that is, questions phrased the way people normally talk, not in the stilted way a search engine like Google understands them. And so far, it’s worked: Watson has been helping nurses and doctors diagnose illnesses, and it’s also managed a major “Jeopardy!” win.

Now, Chef Watson — developed alongside Bon Appetit magazine and several of the world’s finest flavor-profilers — has been launched in beta, enabling you to mash recipes according to ingredients of your own choosing and receive taste-matching advice which, reportedly, can’t fail. While some of the world’s foremost tech luminaries and conspiracy theorists are a bit skeptical about the wiseness of A.I., if it’s going to be used at all, allowing it to tell you what to make out of a fridge full of unloved leftovers seems like an inoffensive enough place to start.

I decided to put it to the test. While employed as a food writer for well over a decade, I’ve also spent a good part of the last nine years working on and off in kitchens. Figuring out how to use “spare” ingredients has become quite commonplace in my professional life. I’ve also developed a healthy disregard for recipes as anything other than sources of inspiration (or annoyance) but for the purposes of this experiment am willing to follow along and try any ingredient at least once.

So, with this in mind, I’m going to let Watson tell me what to eat for a week. I’ve spent a good amount of time playing around with the app, which can be found here, and I’m going to follow its instructions to the letter where possible. I have an audience of willing testers for the food and intend to do my best in recreating its recipes on the plate. Still, I’m going to try to test it a bit.

I want to see whether or not it can save me time in the kitchen; also, whether it has any amazing suggestions for dazzling taste matches; if it can help me use things up in the fridge; and whether or not it’s going to try to get me to buy a load of stuff I don’t really need. A lot of work has gone into the creation of this app — and a lot of expertise. But is it useable? Can human beings understand its recipes? Will we want to eat them? Let’s find out.

A disclaimer before we start: Chef Watson isn’t great at telling you when stuff is actually ready and cooked. You need to use your common sense. Take all of its advice as advice and inspiration only. It’s the flavors that really count.

Monday: The Tailgating Corn Salmon Sandwich

My first impression is that the app is intuitive and pretty simple to use. Once you’ve added an ingredient, it suggests a number of flavor matches, types of dishes and “moods” (including some off-the-wall ones like “Mother’s Day”). Choose a few of these options and the actual recipes begin to bunch up on the right of the screen. I selected salmon and corn, then opted for the wildly suggestive “Tailgating corn salmon sandwich.”

The recipe page itself has links to the original Bon Appetit dish that inspired your A.I. mélange, accompanied by a couple of pictures. There’s a battery of disclaimers stating that Chef Watson really only wants to suggest ideas, rather than tell you what to eat — presumably to stop people who want to try cooking with fiberglass, for example, from launching “no win, no fee” cases.

My own salmon tailgating recipe seemed pretty straightforward.

There are a couple of nice touches on the page, with regard to usability: You can swap out any ingredients that you might not have in stock for others, which Watson will suggest (it seems fond of adding celery root to dishes). For this first attempt I decided to follow Watson’s advice almost to a T. I didn’t have any garlic chile sauce but managed to make a presumably functional analog out of some garlic and chili sauce. The only other change I made involved adding some broad beans, because I like broad beans.

During prep, I employed a nearly unconscious bit of initiative, namely when I cooked the salmon. It’s entirely likely that Watson was, as seemed to be the case, suggesting that I use raw salmon, but it’s Monday night and I’m not in the mood for anything too mind-bending. Team Watson: If I ruined your tailgater with my pig-headed insistence on cooked fish, I’m sorry.

Although I’m not too sorry because, you know, it was actually a really good dish. I was at first unsure — the basil seemed like a bit of an afterthought; I wasn’t sure the lime zest was necessary; and cold salmon salad on a burger bun isn’t really an easy sell. But damn it, I’d make that sandwich again.

It was missing some substance overall. It made enough for two small buns, so I teamed it up with a nice bit of Korean-spiced, pickled cucumber on the side, which worked well. My fellow diner deemed it “fine, if a little uninteresting” — and yes, maybe it could have done with a bit more sharpness and depth, and maybe a little more “a computer told me how to make this” flavor wackiness, but overall: Well done.

Hint! Definitely add broad beans. They totally worked. Now, to mull over what “tailgating” might mean…