Dawn Perry was worried. It was a pretty typical day in the Bon Appétit test kitchen, and the senior food editor had a pretty typical task in front of her: Create five new recipes for a Fourth of July menu. Ribs, a classic slaw, both corn and potato salads, and a berry dessert were all on the docket. Perry had developed similar recipes dozens of times before, if not hundreds. It should have been simple. Easy. Straightforward. But something weighed on her mind as she checked off the items on the ingredient list for her slaw: cabbage, scallion, garlic, mayonnaise…flour? Was this a joke? What the hell was flour doing in a slaw recipe? Couldn't she just nix it altogether?

Unfortunately for Perry, her co-cook wasn't budging. If that cook had been any of her Bon Appétit colleagues—assistant food editor Claire Saffitz, test kitchen manager Brad Leone, or senior associate food editor Alison Roman—she could have swayed them. But Perry wasn't working with a Bon Appétit colleague. She was working with Chef Watson. **

And Chef Watson is—as you may have guessed from that headline up there—a computer.

Or, really, a new kind of computing system. Developed by IBM, Chef Watson is a complex piece of software that essentially discovers and invents dishes, using what it's learned from Bon Appétit's 9,000-odd recipes, plus its own understanding of which chemical flavor compounds go together (and which don't). Through a Web app, Chef Watson had asked Perry for some basic inputs—a specific ingredient to use, a type of dish to create, a theme—and returned her a dizzying array of ingredient lists for her Fourth of July menu, ranking the lists according to how "surprising" they were. (Click here for an in-depth look at how Chef Watson works.) This iteration of the software, however, did not include preparation instructions (the current one does), leaving Perry to puzzle out just how to include flour in a coleslaw.

But that sort of puzzle was precisely the point, because Chef Watson—whose presence in the test kitchen marked the beginning of an ongoing partnership between Bon Appétit and IBM—is not supposed to be a total kitchen solution, but rather a spur to creativity. Which is not to say our test kitchen isn't creative (hello, pickled nectarine salad with burrata!), but Chef Watson's contribution is unique: It sees the connections you sense but can't quite articulate, puts them in front of you, and lets you take control from there.

"We're not going to teach people how to sauté potatoes," explained Florian Pinel, the project's senior software engineer and, as it happens, a graduate of the Institute for Culinary Education in New York, "but we are going to give you ideas for different flavors to add into those potatoes."

Which brings us back to Perry, her slaw, and the flour. She racked her brain. Slaws are, by definition, fresh, crunchy, and a perfect combination of virtuousness and fun. Wait—was there something there? Crunchy. Without some satisfying crispiness, it just wouldn't be a slaw. She smiled, then grabbed a few onions. She knew exactly what she was going to do.

See, in addition to that flour, white onions—which also appeared on Chef Watson's ingredient list—were a bit of an annoyance, too aggressive to add raw into the slaw. So Perry got creative. She sliced the onion into rings, soaked them in mayonnaise and buttermilk (both on Chef Watson's list), then dredged them with—you guessed it—flour. Finally, she fried them in vegetable oil. Two birds, one stone: crispy fried onions, which she scattered generously, along with chopped peanuts, over a napa-cabbage slaw dressed with fish sauce, rice vinegar, tamarind, honey, olive oil, garlic, scallion, basil, and mint (whew!).