As a serious foodie, I’m a ridiculous cook. Luckily, I live in New York where it’s cool not to cook. We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to culinary choices, with some of the best restaurants in the world within walking distance.
I’ve been trying to recreate my favorite foods, but I couldn’t manage even the simplest dishes, so when I heard there was an artificial intelligence app that turns any photo into a recipe, I had to try it.
SideChef’s RecipeGen AI app is a home cooking and online grocery platform. The new beta AI feature lets chefs (or wannabe chefs) take a photo of any dish in a restaurant or on social media and promises to instantly create a step-by-step recipe.
I wanted to see how accurate the ingredients were and how close it was to a restaurant meal I had recently eaten.
SideChef is an award-winning shopping recipe platform that has been on the market since 2013 and whose RecipeGen AI feature launched this month as a step-by-step home cooking app. It’s free to download and use.
Let’s go!
From Sous-Chef to SideChef
The setup was easy. I downloaded the SideChef app on my phone and AddThen Create recipe from photo. You can either take a photo directly in the app or select an image from your library.
To test the accuracy of SideChef, I wanted to try two methods:
- Upload a photo of a meal I made in a Restaurant.
- Upload a photo of a meal I ate at home (because I know exactly what I’m putting in it).
For the restaurant meal, I chose a beginner-friendly brunch dish so SideChef could easily decipher it. We had brunch at Malibu Farm on a recent trip to California, where they put a new twist on breakfast classics like sweet butter and soft sourdough.
To better verify the ingredients, I looked at the menu: “Scrambled eggs – sourdough focaccia and breakfast potatoes with either strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, eggs and bacon.”
This is what SideChef came up with:
Right from the start, I was disappointed by the lack of attention to detail. The dish didn’t contain red or green peppers, onion or potato seasoning. I don’t think it contained milk either, but SideChef added it. Also, the key flavors were missing – strawberry butter, ricotta cheese and the sourdough focaccia.
To give SideChef the benefit of the doubt, the sourdough focaccia is hard to spot because the dimples on the top of the bread are missing in the photo—but sourdough wasn’t even listed there.
It may also have been difficult for SideChef to detect ricotta in the eggs (because he mistook the creaminess for milk). He didn’t even try with the strawberry butter, so I bought regular butter instead.
No, I want my sweet strawberry butter. At this point, I felt SideChef was more interested in using AI to earn an affiliate commission through Walmart (the fulfillment partner).
Before moving on to my home-cooked recipe, I tried another restaurant dish (photo) to test its culinary skills.
This time ramen!
I uploaded this photo:
It “thought” for about 15 seconds, then I got an error message. I tried again as recommended, but to no avail.
Alright, SideChef, let’s try something different. I chose my wife’s favorite dish: sweet potato gnocchi with sausage!
I know the exact ingredients because she made a video about it:
- sweet potato
- egg
- Flour
- Sausage
- Mushrooms
- butter
- broth
- Parmesan
Let’s go!
Now it’s time to cook.
This time it turned out much better. It had the main ingredients, but we added dried tomatoes, probably because we had basil on it.
When 90% of the ingredients were ready, I checked how the app prepared it and what differences there were to our actual preparation.
SideChef suggests:
SideChef actually made the recipe more complicated than it needed to be. It consists of seven simple steps:
- Heat the sweet potato, cut it in half, remove the skin and mash it in a bowl.
- Add an egg and whisk.
- Add one cup of flour and mix.
- Cut the sweet potato dough into four pieces, roll each piece into a thin log and then cut into small gnocchi pieces.
- Fry the sausage in the pan. Add mushrooms, butter and broth.
- Cook the gnocchi and then add them to the pan to make them a little crispier.
- Sprinkle with Parmesan.
The SideChef recipe didn’t specify removing the sweet potato skin, nor did it clearly describe how to cook it. We were advised to bake the gnocchi, but we boiled them. Otherwise, they were 70% done.
The chef’s kiss?
It depends on the recipe. It struggles with nuances and, like other AI tools, will make something up if it’s not sure. It’s a handy little app that can inspire you with new ideas and ingredient combinations, or if you’re in a restaurant and don’t want to bother the waiter with details about the dish.
But for people with a modicum of kitchen skill, SideChef probably isn’t very useful—especially for chefs like my wife who cook on a whim and feel limited in their creativity by following recipes, let alone artificial intelligence.
