I’m a serious foodie, but a cook for laughs. Luckily, I live in New York, where it’s fine not to cook and the options for eating out are endless. I am spoiled for choice, some of the best restaurants in the world are within walking distance of my home.
I’ve been trying to recreate my favorite food, but I fall behind even with the simplest of dishes. So when I heard there was an AI app that would turn any photo into a recipe, I had to give it a try.
SideChef’s RecipeGen AI app is a home cooking and online grocery store platform. A new beta AI feature lets chefs (or would-be chefs) snap a photo no food in a restaurant or on social media and promises to instantly generate a step-by-step recipe.
I wanted to see how accurate the ingredients were and how close it could come to a restaurant meal I had recently.
SideChef is an award-winning shoppable recipe platform that’s been around since 2013, and its RecipeGen AI feature launched this month as a step-by-step home cooking app. It is free to download and use.
Here it goes!
From sous chef to SideChef
Setup was easy. I downloaded the SideChef app to my phone and clicked on Addthen Generate recipe from photo. You can either take a photo directly in the app or choose an image from your library.
To test the accuracy of SideChef, I wanted to try two methods:
- Upload a photo of the food I had in va restaurant.
- Upload a photo of the food I had home (because I know exactly what I put in there).
As a restaurant meal, I chose a beginner-friendly brunch so that SideChef could easily decipher it. We had breakfast at Malibu Farm on a recent trip to California, where breakfast staples like sweet butter and sourdough came true.
I checked the menu to see what the ingredients were so I could better check: “scramble – sourdough focaccia and breakfast potatoes with a choice of strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, egg and bacon.”
SideChef came up with this:
Right off the bat I was disappointed by the lack of attention to detail. The dish had no red pepper, green pepper, onion or potato seasoning. I don’t think it had milk in it either, but SideChef included it. Also missing were the main flavor profiles – strawberry butter, ricotta cheese and sourdough focaccia.
To give SideChef the benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to tell the sourdough focaccia apart because the photo doesn’t show the dimpled top of the bread — but it doesn’t even mention the sourdough.
SideChef might also have had a hard time spotting the ricotta in the eggs (mistaking the creaminess for milk). It didn’t even try strawberry butter, which made me buy regular butter instead.
No, I want my strawberry butter candle. At this point, I felt that SideChef was more interested in using AI to earn an affiliate commission through Walmart (a fulfillment partner).
Before moving on to my homemade recipe, I tried another photo of a restaurant dish to test its culinary skills.
Ramen this time!
I uploaded this photo:
It “thought” for about 15 seconds, then I got an error. Tried again as advised but no luck.
Okay SideChef, let’s try something different. I chose my favorite dish that my wife makes: 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
Here it goes!
We are cooking now.
This time it went much better. It got the main ingredients but she added sundried tomatoes, probably because we had basil on it.
With 90% ingredients, I checked how the app suggested I cook it and how it differed from how we actually did it.
SideChef suggested:
SideChef actually made the recipe more complicated than it needed to be. It’s a simple seven steps:
- Heat the sweet potato, cut it in half, remove the wrapper and mash it in a bowl.
- Add one egg and beat.
- Add the flour to the cup and mix.
- Cut the sweet potato dough into four pieces, roll each into a thin rope, then cut into small gnocchi pieces.
- Fry the sausage in a pan. Add the mushrooms, butter and stock.
- Cook the gnocchi, then add them to the pan to soften a bit.
- Sprinkle with Parmesan.
SideChef’s recipe did not state that the wrapper should be removed from the sweet potatoes, nor did it clearly indicate how to prepare them. It recommended us to bake the gnocchi, but we boiled it instead. In addition, there were 70%.
A chef’s kiss?
It depends on the recipe. It has difficulty with nuance and, like other AI tools, tends to make it up when it’s not sure. It’s a handy little app that can be used to inspire new ideas and combinations of ingredients, or if you’re at a restaurant and don’t want to bother the waiter with details about the food.
But for people with a modicum of skill in the kitchen, SideChef probably isn’t very useful – especially for cooks like my wife who have it and feel creatively constrained by following recipes, let alone AI.
