Set up your kitchen profile
The system needs to know what’s in your kitchen. Not everything — just enough to give you advice that actually works with what you have.
The guided way
From your cooking workspace, run:
/panout-help
If you don’t have a cook profile yet, the skill detects that and walks you through setup conversationally — it asks about your kitchen, your equipment, how you like to cook, and writes the profile for you. If you mention a thermometer, it’ll offer to calibrate it too (ice water, boiling water, a few minutes).
You don’t need to prepare anything or know what it’s going to ask. Just answer naturally and it fills in the rest.
What it’s learning about you
Here’s what the profile captures and why:
- Equipment — your stovetop type, cookware, thermometers. The skills use this to tailor instructions (“heat your dutch oven” instead of a generic description), flag size mismatches before you start, and adjust technique for your specific materials.
- Temperature instruments — a probe thermometer is the single most useful tool for guided cooking. Protocols are built around internal and surface temperatures. An infrared gun is a nice bonus for high-heat searing. Without either, the skills fall back to time-only heuristics.
- Preferences — weeknight speed vs. all-day projects, how much science you want in your guidance, seasoning habits, dietary considerations.
- Household — typical serving count (recipes scale to match) and any household-wide dietary restrictions.
- Environment — altitude shifts boiling points and every time-temperature relationship that depends on them. Water hardness affects seasoning and some reactions.
It’s all plain text
The profile lives in cook-profile.md at your workspace root. Calibration data, if you set it up, lives in calibration.md. Both are readable Markdown files — open them in any editor to review, tweak, or rewrite anything the guided setup produced. The skills just read whatever’s in the file.
Updating your profile
Got a new thermometer? Switched from electric to gas? Just run /panout-help again and tell it what changed — it updates your cook profile. If you’ve added a new temperature instrument and haven’t calibrated it yet, you can ask for a calibration walkthrough in the same conversation.
/panout-help isn’t just for setup, though. It’s the general-purpose entry point for Pan Out. You can use it to ask questions about your protocols, get routed to the right skill (recipe, cook, debrief), or just have a conversation about food. It has your profile and your protocols as context, so it can give you useful answers without you having to explain your kitchen every time.
What if I skip this?
Pan Out works without a profile or calibration. The skills will ask more questions during cooks (because they can’t assume anything about your equipment), and temperature guidance will use true targets only (no instrument-specific readings). Setting up a profile just makes everything smoother.
Next step