For my first sourdough themed inquiry post, I had a lot of different ideas, but I decided to start with a sourdough banana bread. I chose to start with banana bread because it is something I make relatively frequently. I figured it would be nice to find a recipe that I could use sourdough starter with. The recipe I choose was by Emilie Raffa on her blog, The Celver Carrot. I really liked her recipe and wanted to try it. However, I didn’t have everything that the recipe needed. So instead of finding an alternate recipe, I turned to testing out generative AI. I chose to use Google Gemini AI. I asked it a multitude of questions and asked for suggestions as to how to substitute ingredients and materials.

Google Gemini AI conversation

AI Notice: In this inquiry blog post, generative AI was used primarily to find alternatives and help me complete the recipe with the ingredients and tools I had on hand.

For example, the recipe noted using a food processor, and I don’t have one. So I asked AI for it’s suggestions, it initially suggested to use a potato masher, wisk, and even just two forks. But, I remembered that I have a blender and then asked Gemini for suggestions on how to incorporate that instead.

One thing I noticed while baking was, when I added all my ingredients into the blender, I noticed that this would make a cool lesson on density and mixtures. I could rank the ingredients used based on high density to low density. For example, in this image, I can tell that the oat milk is denser than both the mashed banana and, olive oil. which connects to the BC Science 6 Curriculum.

The recipe went quite nicely and I followed all of the suggestions that Google Gemini provided me with. In the end the banana bread turned out pretty well. However, I had a minor hiccup while baking. My power went out (for around 1.5 hours), with around 20 minutes left of cooking time! I decided to keep the oven door closed to keep all the heat inside the oven which allowed for further cooking. However, when I took the banana bread out it was unfortunately still slightly undercooked. I made the executive decision to re-heat the oven to temperature and put the banana bread back in for 15 minutes. Despite the final (slightly burnt) appearance, I was pleasantly surprised by my first taste-test.