---
title: "Sous"
date: 2026-08-11
type: project
blurb: "The cooking companion I want in every home kitchen, calm and on your side. A working prototype runs on our counter, and we cook from it every week."
canonical: https://dazuck.com/projects#sous
---

Any recipe is now a search away, and an AI will write you a new one in seconds. What a home kitchen still lacks is a companion: something that knows what your family likes, gets you through the cook with wet hands, and remembers how you made it last time. Most cooking apps answer with more scrolling, more pop-ups, and more screens to manage.

Sous is my attempt at the opposite: **the ultimate home cook companion, and a calm one.**

## The prototype on our counter

The prototype is a working app running on a Pixel Tablet sitting on our kitchen counter.

![Sous on a tablet: prep boxes ticked off, then cooking steps one at a time, with a timeline of the whole cook beside them](https://dazuck.com/images/assets/sous/sous-cook.webp)

*Cooking from the prototype, shown with demo recipes. Prep comes first, then each step with what's coming next. "The whole cook" on the right shows which steps overlap, with a line marking where you are.*

Recipes come in by message: I send one to our kitchen agent, and it lands in the app's queue alongside our family's own recipe book. Before we start, Sous turns each recipe into a cook plan. It splits prep from cooking, pulls out anything that has to happen ahead of time, and lays out which steps run in parallel.

![Sous prep screen listing what to do ahead: soften butter an hour before, warm eggs thirty minutes before, chill dough at least two hours before](https://dazuck.com/images/assets/sous/sous-ahead.webp)

*The part a printed recipe buries in step 4: what needs doing an hour before you start.*

It works from the documents our family already keeps instead of a database of its own. Our family recipe book, a shared Google Doc, syncs into the app's library, so our favorites sit next to whatever came in that week. A second doc, Sugarface Kitchen, lists what's in our fridge, freezer and pantry, along with notes on how each of us eats. When I ask Sous something mid-cook, like what to use instead of the cream, it answers from what we actually have, those notes, and how we rated what we've cooked recently.

Cooking from it every week keeps reshaping it. The first voice version listened all the time, and on the tablet that meant a chime every few seconds and no answer to "Sue". Now you tap once and talk. Most changes look like that: small, and found at dinner rather than at a desk.

I'm using this for almost all of my cooking, getting my phone and laptop away but letting me have the creativity of cooking with AI that I love. There's a bigger vision for how this can expand to really end to end help make our family meals calmer and better, which I'll share more on later.

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