Sage AI
Your AI kitchen companion — woven into every part of From Our Table to help you capture, plan, and cook with confidence.
What is Sage?
Sage is From Our Table's AI kitchen companion, powered by Azure OpenAI. Wherever you see the leaf icon, Sage is ready to help.
Sage can:
- Answer questions about any recipe — substitutions, technique, timing, and more
- Read recipes from photos, camera snaps, and PDF files
- Import recipes from any URL on the web
- Generate a complete recipe from scratch — just describe the dish
- Suggest dishes that pair well with any recipe you're viewing
- Generate a step-by-step cooking timeline for your event
- Consolidate and group shopping lists across all your menu recipes
- Write descriptions for recipes that don't have one
You're planning Easter dinner and haven't used the site before. In one afternoon, Sage reads your physical cookbook, suggests what to pair with the roast lamb, builds your shopping list, and tells you exactly when to start cooking each dish so everything hits the table at 2 pm.
Ask Sage
On any recipe detail page, click Ask Sage to open a conversation panel. Type any question about the recipe and Sage answers in context — it already knows the title, ingredients, and steps, so you don't need to explain what you're making.
Things you can ask:
- Substitutions — "I don't have buttermilk, what can I use?"
- Technique — "How do I know when the onions are properly caramelised?"
- Scaling — "If I double this, do I also double the baking time?"
- Dietary changes — "How do I make this gluten-free?"
- Timing — "Can I make the dough the night before?"
- Troubleshooting — "Mine came out too dense last time — what might have gone wrong?"
Sage remembers the thread of your questions within the session, so you can follow up naturally — "what about the sauce?" — without repeating yourself. The panel closes when you navigate away, and a fresh conversation starts next time you open it.
You're halfway through Grandma's pie recipe and realise you're out of lard. Open Ask Sage, type "can I use butter instead of lard for the pastry?" — Sage explains the difference in texture and gives you the substitution ratio. You follow up with "will it affect the baking time?" and Sage answers that too, all without leaving the recipe.
Photo & PDF import
Go to Recipes → Add a Recipe → Photo / PDF. Upload one or more photos or a PDF document. Sage reads the text and fills in the recipe form — title, ingredients, steps, and more.
Multiple photos for one recipe
If a recipe spans multiple pages, upload all the photos before clicking Import. Sage reads them as a single document and stitches the recipe together.
Multiple recipes in one document
If your upload contains more than one recipe — a two-page spread, a PDF chapter, or a photographed index card — Sage detects them all. A picker appears showing every recipe found. You can:
- Bulk import: Select any combination and import them all at once.
- Review mode: Toggle "Review before importing" to open each recipe in the form, make edits, then save one by one.
Your church's fundraiser cookbook is a 120-page scanned PDF with 200 recipes. Upload it once — Sage finds all 200, presents them in a picker, and you tick the 18 you actually want. Done in minutes, not hours.
Tips for best results
- Good, even lighting — avoid harsh shadows across the text
- Page lying flat, camera directly above (not at an angle)
- High enough resolution that individual letters are sharp
- For physical books: press the spine flat or photograph one page at a time
Sage works well with printed recipes, handwritten cards (if the handwriting is clear), and scanned PDFs. Recipes in foreign languages are also handled — Sage can translate as it imports.
Recipe pairings
On any recipe detail page, scroll to the Pairs well with section and click Ask Sage for pairings. Sage considers the flavors, cuisine, and cooking style of the recipe and suggests complementary dishes.
Suggestions come in two types:
- From your collection — recipes already saved by your family that would pair well. Clicking the title takes you straight to that recipe.
- Generated by Sage — new recipe ideas marked with the Sage badge. Click Preview & add to see the full recipe before deciding whether to save it to your collection.
Asking for a specific pairing type
Alongside the main Ask Sage for pairings button, you'll see chips for specific pairing types — Side dish, Sauce, Appetizer, Dessert, Bread, Salad, and (if your family has enabled it) Drink. Click a chip to ask Sage exclusively for that type of pairing. The heading updates to show the active type, and you can click Find different pairings with the same type to get a fresh set.
If you don't select a type, Sage suggests whatever complementary dishes it thinks fit best.
You're viewing your roast chicken recipe and want ideas for sides only. Click Side dish — Sage finds two sides already in your family's collection and suggests a Sage-generated herbed focaccia. You preview the focaccia, love the look of it, and add it to your collection with one click.
Click Find different pairings to ask Sage for a fresh set of suggestions.
Generating a recipe
Don't have a recipe to import? Ask Sage to write one. Go to Recipes → Add a Recipe → Generate with Sage, type a dish name or description, and click Generate. Sage creates a full recipe — title, description, ingredients, and steps — populated directly into the add recipe form.
- You can edit any part of the generated recipe before saving, just like a manually entered recipe.
- The more detail you give, the more tailored the result: "chicken soup" works, but "light lemony chicken soup with orzo and fresh dill, 6 servings" gives you something much closer to what you had in mind.
- Sage-generated recipes are yours once saved — they carry no permanent AI label and can be edited, shared, and versioned like any other recipe.
Your kids love a dish a friend made at a dinner party — something with sausage, fennel, and a creamy tomato sauce — but you never got the recipe. Type "Italian sausage pasta with fennel and creamy tomato sauce" and Sage produces a complete recipe. You tweak the proportions after testing it once, save the final version, and it joins your family collection.
Day Of cooking timeline
On any menu with an event date and time set, open the Day Of tab and click Ask Sage to plan. Sage builds a reverse-engineered timeline working backwards from your event time.
The plan accounts for:
- Cooking times and resting periods for every dish
- Oven temperature conflicts (so you're not trying to roast at 425°F and bake at 325°F simultaneously)
- Make-ahead steps — tasks that can or should be done days in advance are clearly flagged
- Your planner notes — if you told Sage the turkey is frozen, it adds defrost time at the start
Easter brunch at noon. You have a quiche, a fruit tart, roasted asparagus, and hash browns. Sage's plan: make the tart pastry the night before, blind-bake it at 9 am, fill and bake the quiche at 9:30 am, roast the asparagus at 11:15 am, and fry the hash browns at 11:45 am. Everything arrives at the table at the same time.
The plan is saved to the menu. Edit individual steps if you know better — Sage's suggestions are a starting point, not gospel. Click Regenerate with Sage to create a fresh plan at any time.
For more detail, see Menus → Day Of Planning.
Shopping list consolidation
When you generate a shopping list from a menu, Sage does more than add up the quantities. It understands that "2 cloves garlic" and "a clove of garlic" are the same thing, and that "1 cup flour" and "3 cups flour" from two different recipes should become "4 cups flour — buy a 5 lb bag."
See Menus → Generating a Shopping List for the full walkthrough.
Notes & tips extraction
When Sage imports a recipe from a URL or a photo, it looks for any content that appears in a labeled Notes, Tips, Cook's Notes, Make-Ahead, Storage, or Variations section, as well as introductory commentary written by the author. That content is copied faithfully into the recipe's Notes field — word for word, not rewritten or summarized.
Sage does not invent notes that aren't in the source. If a recipe has no notes section, the Notes field will be empty after import.
The Sage badge
Occasionally Sage may add a note that goes beyond what was in a labeled source section — for example, a storage tip inferred from the recipe itself rather than from an explicit author note. These are marked with a Sage badge in the Notes section of the recipe detail page, so you can always tell what came directly from the original and what Sage contributed. Sage-contributed notes are capped at three per recipe; all source-extracted notes are preserved in full.
You import a recipe from a baking blog. The post has a "Cook's Notes" section with three tips about butter temperature. Those three tips appear in the Notes field without a badge — they came straight from the author. Sage does not add any tips of its own, because the recipe already has a complete notes section.
Sage's limitations & accuracy
Sage is a powerful tool, but it's not perfect. Here's what to keep in mind:
- Always verify ingredient amounts. Sage can misread handwritten text or misinterpret ambiguous formatting. Double-check quantities before cooking.
- Cooking times are estimates. Ovens vary, altitudes matter, and ingredient sizes differ. Treat Sage's timings as a guide, not a guarantee.
- Allergen information is not guaranteed. Sage does not have complete visibility into every ingredient's composition. If someone in your household has a food allergy, verify ingredients manually.
- Generated content is labeled. Any recipe Sage invents (rather than imports) is marked with the Sage badge, as are any notes Sage contributes beyond what appeared in the original recipe's source.
- Sage uses Azure OpenAI. Recipe content sent to Sage features is processed by Azure OpenAI and is not used to train AI models. See our Privacy Policy for details.
Think of Sage the way you'd think of a very well-read sous chef who hasn't tasted every dish: full of ideas and hard-working, but always worth a second pair of eyes before serving to guests.