You Call This Thai Food? The Robotic Taster Will Be the Judge

BANGKOK — Hopscotching the globe as Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra repeatedly encountered a distressing problem: bad Thai food.

Too often, she found, the meals she sampled at Thai restaurants abroad were unworthy of the name, too bland to be called genuine Thai cooking. The problem bothered her enough to raise it at a cabinet meeting.

Her political party has since been thrown out of office, in a May military coup, but her initiative in culinary diplomacy lives on.

At a gala dinner at a ritzy Bangkok hotel on Tuesday the government will unveil its project to standardize the art of Thai food — with a robot.

Diplomats and dignitaries have been invited to witness the debut of a machine that its promoters say can scientifically evaluate Thai cuisine, telling the difference, for instance, between a properly prepared green curry with just the right mix of Thai basil, curry paste and fresh coconut cream, and a lame imitation.

A boxy contraption filled with sensors and microchips, the so-called e-delicious machine scans food samples to produce a chemical signature, which it measures against a standard deemed to be the authentic version.

The government-financed Thai Delicious Committee, which oversaw the development of the machine, describes it as “an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic.”

In a country of 67 million people, there are somewhere near the same number of strongly held opinions about Thai cooking. A heated debate here on the merits of a particular nam prik kapi, a spicy chili dip of fermented shrimp paste, lime juice and palm sugar, could easily go on for an hour without coming close to resolution.

But there does seem to be some agreement on one point at least: Bad Thai food is a more acute problem overseas.

Thais, who can establish an immediate bond discussing where they will get their next meal or the merits of particular food stalls, complain that Thai restaurants overseas cater to non-Thai palates by pulling punches on spice and not respecting the delicate balance between sweet, sour, salty and four-alarm spicy.

Ingredients like fresh tamarind, Thai limes and galangal, an aromatic root similar to ginger, are not readily available overseas, and the substitution of inferior ingredients frequently yields a dish that a Bangkok gourmand might describe in the Thai vernacular as “food even a dog would not swallow.”

Add to that a soupçon of culinary chauvinism, which holds that authentic Thai food can be prepared only by Thais, usually, Thai cooks say, those who absorbed their cooking acumen tugging on the apron strings of their grandmothers.

“There are many Thai restaurants all around the world that are not owned by Thai people,” said Supachai Lorlowhakarn, an adviser to the National Innovation Agency, which is in charge of the Thai Delicious program. He added, almost apologetically, “They are owned by Vietnam or Myanmar, or maybe even Italian or French.”

The agency has spent around one-third of its budgeted 30 million baht, around $1 million, on Thai Delicious, including around $100,000 to develop the e-delicious machine, according to Sura-at Supachatturat, a manager at the agency. The Thai Delicious Committee, which includes government officials, scholars, a chef and a food critic, also receives financing from private companies that are partners in the project.

One element of the program is a direct result of Ms. Yingluck’s travels. On a visit to New York she noticed the sanitation inspection system in which letter grades are pasted on restaurant windows, according to a former aide, and wondered whether Thailand could develop a similar system to shame Thai restaurants into making tastier food.

So Thai Delicious offers a logo that restaurants can affix to their menus as long as chefs use officially sanctioned recipes.

Thai Delicious has also produced a free app that includes recipes approved by a government committee. So far, the committee has approved about 10 recipes, three of which have been published on the Thai Delicious app.

But the tasting machine is the real novelty. Nakah Thawichawatt, a businessman who is trying to commercialize it, hopes to sell models for $18,000 apiece to Thai Embassies in countries with many Thai restaurants.

The machine evaluates food by measuring its conductivity at different voltages. Readings from 10 sensors are combined to produce the chemical signature.

“We wanted the cheapest and easiest approach to measure food,” said Sirapat Pratontep, a British-trained expert in nanotechnology who led the development of the machine. “You just put in the food and you get a rating.”

Because even computers cannot judge taste, the food is compared with a standard derived from a database of popular preferences for each dish. For tom yam, the spicy soup infused with Kaffir lime leaves and coriander, for instance, researchers posted notices at the prestigious Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, requesting 120 tasters. The tasters — students, university staff and area workers — were paid a few dollars each for their trouble. They were served 10 differently prepared soups and rated each one.

The winning soup was declared the standard, and its chemical coordinates were programmed into the machine. As a greater number of tasters’ opinions are programmed into the machine, it will be able to judge whether a dish is too salty or spicy or has other flavor defects, Mr. Sirapat said.

A reporter who visited the laboratory where the machine is being developed brought green curry prepared in the kitchens of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. A sample was placed in the stainless-steel tray, the machine made a whirring sound, and moments later it issued a score of 78 out of 100.

“Normally we say that anything lower than 80 is not up to standard,” Mr. Nakah said. He hypothesized that the club might be catering to foreign tastes. “Maybe because foreigners eat there they prepare it differently,” he said.

Traditionally, the main laboratory of Thai cuisine is the street. Legions of roadside chefs — many of whom have fanatic followings but have never used a measuring cup, let alone followed a written recipe — work in kitchens that often consist only of a large wok embedded in a hand-pushed cart.

At a tiny food stall along one of Bangkok’s traffic-clogged boulevards, the owner, Thaweekiat Nimmalairatana, 35, questioned the very notion of standard recipes.

He has been cooking since he was 10 years old and said the slightest variation during the preparation of his dishes — changing the order that ingredients are mixed or the brand of fish sauce — affects the taste.

“I use my tongue to test if it’s delicious or not,” he said. “I think the government should consider using a human to gauge authenticity.”