Nick DiGiovanni - I Cooked Against Robots

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

The last robot was CRAZY...

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Robots are becoming more and more like humans. They can build cars, clean your house, and even do parkour. But in this video, I'm cooking against three levels of robots to find out who's the better chef, robots or humans. For level one, Mark Rober will be the judge. We're gonna see if Nick can beat some of the most basic kitchen robots that money can buy. And level one, we'll have five speed rounds,

chopping, stirring, toasting, pizza making, and cleaning. And to win, it's a classic best three out of five. Are you team robot or team Nick? I mean, of course, I am team. Team Robot. For this first mini round, we'll be testing chopping skills. And in the robot corner, we've got the Robocoo. It's basically an extremely powerful food processor

with a couple of Googly eyes to boot. I like putting googly eyes on my robots. Are you ready, Nick? Let's do this. Start. No? Said start, yeah. I'm taking my time.

I'm not worried. Oh. How many you want me to put in, Nick? I mean, your team robot. That's true. That feels like a good start. Oh no. Oh, that's so bad.

Oh my God. I didn't have the time to put it under. This seems so unfair. Look at that. They're like perfect cubes. Before you actually judge, let's look at our cuts. Yours aren't even real cubes. Those are like rectangular prisms.

I mean, this is like laser precision. As a chef, do you want smaller cubes like that or bigger? I mean, it takes more skill to make smaller cubes. I rule in favor of our robot overlord. For speed round number two, we're gonna be testing your stirring skills. You will be facing off against an army of five stirring robots once again with Googliacs. They are very cute.

Thank you. Because stirring just one pan wouldn't be much of a challenge, we each have five pans, but there's just one of me and there are five robots. We're going to be stirring pine nuts, which are expensive and burn really easily. So the first person to burn their nuts loses. That doesn't sound great.

OK, here we go. Time to turn on the robot army. And as soon as I start smelling and especially seeing burnt pine nuts, somebody's losing. This seems a little unfair again. I don't know. So we're getting good spinning, but the problem is, is just spinning in place and not going to every edge of the pan. Also, I think like two googly eyes have dropped into the pan.

That feels like a definite points off situation. I have seen you spill a few nuts, and I don't love that, Nick. Yeah, but your robots aren't even touching the nuts. I actually think I might win this challenge. I'm actually going to do something the robots can't do and switch my pans around to kind of keep things even as well. And the robots, they just don't have arms. A melting. He's melting.

Stoze off. Stoze off. What happened here? disaster on the robot front. It completely charred these pine nuts. And on top of that, the plastic feats melted in the pan. Wow. This is a nice, even golden brown.

Let me taste test. That's good. I don't have the courage to try any of these. Plastics not necessarily my thing. This one's an easy call. Nick, winner of this round. We're all tied up, heading into speed round number three. For round three, we'll be testing your ability to make toast.

It's very simple, but easy. easy to screw up. From personal experience. On the robot side, we have this extremely high-tech $500 toaster with the screen. So where's your screen, Nick? On the human side, I have a good old pan with some fire. Is that how you actually make toast at home?

Yeah. You're so fancy. At the end of this round, I will judge the winner based on looks and taste. Here we go. Oh, wow. Bread, English muffin, waffle, bagel. Hey, do your thing.

Don't look over here. And start. Oh, there it goes. So the key to making a nice slice of toast mark, while your toaster just slowly takes a sweet time over there. I like to quickly hit both sides of the toast right away. And you have to be very gentle. You don't want to press into the toast.

Wait, why tweezers? I'm cooking against a $500 robot. It's all about precision. Okay, how are we doing here? Oh, it's browning. Oh, I feel like I smell and see smoke though. Oh, it's a countdown now. Seven, six, five.

Yeah, where's your countdown? Come to Papa. Oh, wow. Okay. Actually, that is pretty exact. The key with, toast is to make sure that the outside is nice and crispy while the inside stays nice and light and fluffy. This is a butter knife, right?

No. Oh my gosh, look at that. Oh, wow. That looks like grilled cheese. I'm even going to get the sides. Why don't you do that, toaster? I'm nervous about this one. You're putting a lot of chef's kiss in that. So that I can be a very impartial judge, I'm going to close my eyes, and it's just the one-by challenge. You know the rules. Mark, I'm going to shuffle them around. Okay.

So number one. Can you do like an airplane sound? That makes me want to cry, it's so good. Can we just do one more bite at number one before we move on? Sure. And with the airplane sounds. I didn't know toast could taste so good. Number two, I'm not doing airplane.

Uh-huh. Oh, my comparison, this is just like a wet sock. Number one by a nautical mile. Number one was me. Wow, okay. Well, I finished eating this. The score is now humans two. Robots 1.

For speed round number four, we're gonna see who can make the best pizza? Man versus robot. And this is a doozy here. All I have to do is load in the sauce. Now I just gotta add in some cheese. Put my dough right there. I haven't even started. All right, here we go.

It's scanning the pizza. Look at that laser scan. Sauce goes on. Now right here is where it's putting the pepperoni's on. Seems super unfair. Wow. Put that in the loose. Honestly, how many pizzas I can make in the time it takes you to make one?

I'm still just rolling out my dough. Well, I'm over here laser scanning pizzas. Not only are you taking forever, but you're also making a mess. Luckily, round five deals with cleaning up messes. Do you need any help? Do you know how to make a pizza? I do not.

At this point, I'm just trying to finish my pizza before Mark makes number four? Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, you have exactly 40 seconds. I can do 40 seconds. Let's just do a little bit of olive oil. Oh, never mind.

Zero second. It was done. I'm done too. Very, very different looking pizza. Very different looking. That looks like it's about to go into easy bake oven. These are masterpieces. Like put these in a brick oven. Already I feel like this is off to an unfair start, but it's not done yet. I think

we should bake them. We need to bake them. Okay, time's up and Nick's pizza looks interesting. Now as for the robot, look at that. Aesthetically, the robot definitely has it at this point, but let's see how they taste. Human first. That's like a 4.8. Not for the robots? To be honest, the taste is pretty similar. The robot has a way better ratio of like dough to cheese to pepperoni. It's just a much more balanced fight. Robot takes it. And that means going into the fifth and final round,

it's robots two, Nick two, we are tied. And speaking of the final round, it's an absolute mess back here thanks to Nick. Time for our cleanup challenge. All right, this is it. Fifth and final round, Nick, you made quite a mess here. I'm adding a little extra. It's you versus the Roomba cleaning robot.

I'm gonna divide this down the middle. You have to clean that side. The Roomba's gotta clean this side. Why did you give me so much more to clean? Now remember, this is winner takes all. Whoever wins this round wins all of level one. Okay, come on boy, do something. Oh, wow, that's good.

That is way cleaner than I was expecting. Honestly, that's making me extremely nervous. The problem is, he's going the wrong way. Not to brag, but I'm doing pretty well over here. Prumba, where are you going? You hardly did any work. You didn't earn a docking station. Oh, here he comes. Let's go, round two, baby.

Oh, he's getting my side dirty again. Yeah, sabotage. Robot, where are you going? No. I think I'm ready for the final verdict. Well, given that we were tied heading into this round, Nick, whoever won this cleanup round wins all of level one.

And after looking at the results, the winner for all of level one between robots and humans is the humans! Nick! Congratulations. I am sorry, Mark, because I know you want a robots to win. deep down. I really do. Robots, don't let me down in level two. You got this. For level two, I'll be cooking against Moli, the world's first fully robotic kitchen.

I'm kind of scared. It took 10 years of research to make this robot, and it can recreate movements of a professional chef and has over 5,000 recipes uploaded to its memory. We're going head to head to see who can make a better pasta dish, and at the end, a blind taste test will determine who wins this round. Before we start cooking, I'm going to choose the recipe that Moli is going to make today. And since we're doing pasta I'm gonna go with a spaghetti puttinesca I just found out that this is a kill switch so he starts beating me I'm just gonna whack it it's time to find out if Moli's really worked that $100,000 price tag and here he goes first things first

it looks like he's turning on the cooktop oh we're going for the olive oil good start moly now it's grabbing some olives anchovies some garlic some capers sometimes I feel like moly's just doing fancy movements to flex on all of us what's using a spatula moly's scraping the bottom of the pan right now making sure all those nice little flavorable bits aren't sitting there and burning. The more I watch right now, the more nervous I'm getting about this competition. Thinking about pressing the red button. It just tapped and now is scraping off the extra ingredients on the spatula. This is unbelievable. And in we go with the tomato sauce and he's going to mix it all up. Here comes the pasta. Oh, come on with the tap. That just seems like you're rubbing it in. Some of that pasta is sitting above the water right now. So I'm wondering if Moli's going to do anything to make sure that that goes under the water. Oh, okay, at this point, you have to wonder if the robot just heard me say that, or maybe it's just really that smart on his side.

So I'm guessing right now that Moli has it down to an exact timing. And I'm thinking right now that this might be the most perfectly cooked pasta I have ever seen in my life. Oh, you missed a noodle, Moli. Let me help you. It's very well cooked. This here seems like the final step, just throwing in these herbs. So after one last wipe of the spatula, it looks like the dish is complete. That was amazing.

The only chance that I might have is if the judge picks up on that some of the pasta might be a little bit less cooked than the rest of the pasta. Molli didn't quite fully stir it all the way here. But I'm going to help Moli plated on. to a nice dish so the judge cannot tell which is the robots and which is mine. I'm going into this challenge a bit nervous, but for my dish I'll be making an uni butter pasta. To begin, I'm starting out with this fresh sea urchin. Sea urchin tastes almost like butter, so it's going to be perfect with our pasta.

First, I'll add these to a small blender, making sure to use plenty. Then for a bit of acidity, I'll add just a touch of yuzoo juice, and for a bit of color, just a touch of saffron oil. Now because we want to make an uni butter, I'll take a few nice knobs of butter and add that to my uni. Once it reaches a nice, smooth and creamy, consistency, our uni butter is done. Now I'm actually gonna cook my pasta a little bit earlier

than Moli cooked his. I'll start by tossing a generous amount of salt into my pasta water and then in we go with some fresh homemade pasta. You hear that robot? Homemade pasta. I'll go in with a bit of pasta water to a new pan and then drop in a nice few spoonfuls of our fresh uni butter. We'll mix this together so it forms a nice sauce

and then in goes our pasta. I know robots aren't supposed to be able to feel emotions but I have a feeling Moli's scared right now. I'll add in my pasta nice and tight in the center of my plate, then finish with a nice of herb oil, a few pieces of fresh sea urchin, and just a few nice microbeats. Time to see who wins. After a bit of plating help, here's the robot spaghetti Putanesca, and here's my dish,

and Uni butter pasta. The way they're plated, the judge shouldn't be able to tell who made which dish. Harrison will be the judge for our blind taste test. Oh, damn, I'm being honest right now. I have no clue which one's which. I'm gonna start with the Uni bar pasta. I've never had Uni by the way before, so this is like a first time for everything. That's insane.

Putenesca. Here we go. This is good. I'm just trying to figure out how is a robot sliced olives, put capers over, but then how have we got Ooni over here? I'm so sorry if I get this wrong. I think the robot made the Ooni pasta. I'm gonna say

the Puttanesca tastes better. That's made by the robot. No, it's not. I'm so sorry. I just lost to a robot, fair and square. That means we're tied one to one. and it all comes down to round three. For level three, our final challenge,

I'll be cooking a steak against Neo Beta, an advanced humanoid robot. What's up, Neo? How's you going? The way this will work is simple. In front of us are three steaks. We've got a porterhouse, a filet mignon, and a ribeye.

We're each going to cook one, and the audience will decide in the comments below who is the true champion. How about we do rock paper scissors to see who picks first? I'm down for rock paper scissors. You ready? Rock paper, scissors, shoot. I beat you.

Fair is fair. get to pick first go ahead my dad likes the porterhouse the most personally i'm usually a ribeye guy but today i'm going with the filet you're going with the filet yeah just a classic cut go for it's all you oh i'm probably going to go with the rib eye the steaks have been chosen best of luck chef neo but the best chef is that's a week and shape the first thing with a steak of course is salt and pepper so i'm going to go salt all over my beautiful rib eye and i can see you're also starting with your salt by the way how long have you been cooking i'm curious three months you've only been cooking for three months? I'm only a year old. What do you expect? I read a little bit about cooking steaks on

Wikipedia before this. Nick, I don't know if you know or not, but when you season a steak, you're supposed to get all the different sides. I don't know if you're trying to get in my head or what you're doing, but it's not going to work. I'm ready to cook. You know how to turn on the burner? Of course. I'm just going to twist this knob real quick. And there it is. Nice job. All right. I'm just going to grab my... Oh, sorry about that? That's all right. That's all right. Pick it up real quick. Okay. That is impressive. Do you mind if I borrow that? Yeah. Let me just grab it for you real Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Okay, perfect. So our oil is in both of our pans. I think my oil is getting to that temp that I'm ready to put my steak in. What about you? Me too. Nick, would you mind hand me that spatula over there? Yeah, absolutely. Not a problem at all. Just going to pick it up nice and careful here. And just like that. Nice and easy.

Here, you're ready for this sound? Yeah, let's see it. Pretty good. When you see here, you just want to make sure it's fully flat to get the best sear possible on the bottom of the steak. So I'm just applying some light pressure with the spatula here. I'm going for the flip. Nick, check this out. And there it is. Oh my gosh, no way you just did that. All right, I'm gonna go for my flip now. Mine doesn't look as good as yours. All right, Nick, I'm gonna go in for the butter.

Three, two, one, and touchdown. You're actually butter basing now. Yep. How do you even know what that is? I was watching a lot of food network last week. Mine's actually done. I'm gonna go ahead and start resting it. I'm not allowed to use knives, so could you help me?

I just need those potatoes behind me over there. Just chop those up real quick, and I'm just gonna make a quick side dish. Hey, could you just grab me a plate over there? You're gonna keep bossing me around. And put it right there. Just rest after like five-ish minutes. That'd be pretty good.

Bring those potatoes over right, you about here. Okay. And I'll just grab them. Alright, I'm just gonna add a couple into the fan here. Can I have this very snap please? Listen, I, I, this is it. I'm not helping you anymore. I need to make my Chimmy Cherry.

Now I'm gonna go in with a bit of olive oil, then a nice splash of white wine vinegar, then some garlic, fresh parsley. Whoa! Just a touch of paprika, a few red pepper flakes, bit of garlic powder, a touch of salt, a good amount of fresh cracked pepper. And last,

but not least my secret ingredients. Mm-hmm, I'm listening. A few pistachios. You see what you're up against right now? Yeah, that's advanced stuff. Here we go. You want to taste? That's real funny, Nick.

Let's just cut the steaks. Congratulations, Neil. We finished cooking both of our steaks. The question now is, who's do we cut into first? I think we gotta definitely go to yours. The pressure is on for both of us. That's right. I'm gonna cut right in the middle.

I'm gonna give you a sneak peek first. What do you think? Not too shabby. You can be honest with me. Are you nervous? I'm a little nervous. It is my first time cooking a steak. Moment of truth, okay?

Three, two, one. Look at that. As much as I hate to admit it, it looks like Neo also got a perfect medium rare. Before you all vote in the comments below, who won this challenge. I won the first level. Then the robots won round two with that amazing spaghetti Putanesca.

So it all comes down to this, level three. Neo, why don't you explain your dish first? So I prepared for you a filetian perfect medium rare. And as you can see, we have these beautiful potatoes, as well as some perfectly seared asparagus. I will admit, Your actually looks pretty good. But what I have here is a more flavorful rib-eye.

Cook perfectly medium, which is my personal favorite. You and I can agree to disagree on that one. You're just wrong. And under it, I've made a pistachio chimituri and topped it off with a few extra parsley leaves. Don't let the parsley leaves fool yet. They don't really do much. All right, guys, you've seen everything you need to see.

So make sure you go subscribe and then go down to the comments below and say who you think won. Neo, any last words? That's based in it. Robats are way cooler in every single way hot. Lazzang sur-joled. the power between

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