As a serious foodie, I'm a terrible cook. Thankfully, I live in New York, where I don't have to cook. With some of the best restaurants in the world within walking distance, I have no shortage of culinary options.
I tried to recreate some of my favorite dishes, but even simple dishes just didn't work out, so when I heard about an AI app that can turn any photo into a recipe, I decided to give it a try.
SideChef's RecipeGen AI app is a home cooking and online grocery platform, and its new beta AI feature allows chefs (or aspiring chefs) to take a photo of any dish at a restaurant or on social media and instantly generate 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, an award-winning shoppable recipe platform that has been on the market since 2013, launched its RecipeGen AI feature this month as a step-by-step home cooking app that is free to download and use.
Let's go!
From sous chef to side chef
Setup was easy: download the SideChef app on your phone, click “Add,” then “Generate recipe from photo,” and you can either take a photo directly in the app or choose an image from your library.
To test SideChef's accuracy, I tried two methods:
Upload a photo of a meal you had at a restaurant. Upload a photo of a meal you had at home (because you know exactly what went into it).
For restaurant meals, SideChef chose entry-level brunch dishes to make them easy to follow: We brunched at Malibu Farm on a recent trip to California, where they served fresh twists on breakfast classics like sweet butter and fluffy sourdough.
Amanda Smith/CNET
To be better sure, I checked the menu to see what the ingredients were: “Scrambled – Sourdough focaccia and breakfast potatoes with strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, egg, bacon.”
Here's what SideChef came up with:
Firstly, I was disappointed by the lack of attention to detail: this dish was missing red and green peppers, onions and potato seasonings, I don't think it also had milk, which SideChef had, and it also lacked strawberry butter, ricotta and sourdough focaccia, which are key flavour features.
To give SideChef the benefit of the doubt, the photo doesn't show the indentation at the top of the bread, making it hard to tell from sourdough focaccia, but the photo doesn't even mention sourdough.
SideChef may have had trouble finding the ricotta in the eggs (mistaking the creaminess for milk) and didn't even bother trying it with strawberry butter, instead buying regular butter.
No, I want fancy strawberry butter. At this point, it seemed like SideChef was interested in using AI to earn affiliate commissions through Walmart (a fulfillment partner).
Before moving on to the recipe to make at home, I tried out a photo of a dish from another restaurant to test its mettle.
This time it's ramen!
I uploaded this photo:
Amanda Smith/CNET
It “thought” for about 15 seconds, then I got an error, I followed your advice and tried again, but it didn't work.
Ok, SideChef, let's try something different: I chose my wife's favorite dish she makes: sweet potato gnocchi with sausage.
Amanda Smith/CNET
She made the video, so I know the exact ingredients.
Sweet potato Egg Flour Sausage Mushroom Butter Soup Parmesan
Let's go!
I'm cooking now.
This time it worked out pretty well: the main ingredients are there, but also some sun-dried tomatoes, probably because they were served with basil.
Now that I had 90% of the ingredients, I checked to see how the app suggested cooking it vs. how I actually cooked it.
SideChef Suggests:
SideChef actually made the recipe more complicated than it needed to be, it's only 7 easy steps.
Warm the sweet potatoes, slice them down the middle, peel them and mash them in a bowl. Add 1 egg and whisk. Add 1 cup of flour and mix. Cut the sweet potato dough into 4 pieces, roll each piece into a thin rope, then cut into small gnocchi pieces. Fry the sausage in a frying pan. Add the mushrooms, butter and broth. Boil the gnocchi and add them to the pan to crisp them up a bit. Sprinkle with Parmesan.
The SideChef recipe didn't tell us to peel the sweet potatoes, didn't give clear instructions on how to cook them, it called for baking the gnocchi but we boiled them, and other than that it was 70% done.
Chef's kiss?
It depends on the recipe. It's not very good at understanding nuances and, like any AI tool, it tends to make things up when it doesn't know what to do. This is a handy little app to use when you want to come up with new ideas or ingredient combinations, or when you're in a restaurant and don't want to ask the waiter for the details of a dish.
But for anyone with even a modicum of skill in the kitchen, SideChef may not be of much use, especially for cooks like my wife who find following a recipe, let alone an AI, limits their creativity.
