Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology. Her stories hold a mirror to society, reflecting both its malaise and its beauty. Amanda's work has been published in National Geographic, The Guardian, Business Insider, Vice, News Corp, Singapore Airlines, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine. Amanda is an Australian living in the cultural center of gravity that is New York City.
I'm a serious foodie but a laughable cook. Thankfully, I live in New York City, where it's cool not to cook and there are endless options for eating out. I'm spoiled for culinary choice, with some of the best restaurants in the world within walking distance of my home.
I've tried to re-create my favorite food but fall short with even the simplest dishes. So when I heard there was an artificial intelligence app that would turn 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 allows cooks (or wannabe cooks) to take a photo of any dish at a restaurant or on social media, and it promises to instantly generate a step-by-step recipe.
I wanted to see how accurate the ingredients were and how close it could get to a restaurant meal I recently had.
SideChef is an award-winning shoppable recipe platform that has been in the market since 2013, and its RecipeGen AI feature launched this month as a step-by-step home cooking app. It's free to download and use.
To test out SideChef's accuracy, I wanted to try two methods:
For the restaurant meal, I chose a beginner-friendly brunch dish to make it easy for SideChef to decipher. We'd brunched at Malibu Farm on a recent trip to California, where they put a fresh spin on breakfast staples like sweet butter and pillowy sourdough.
I checked the menu to see what the ingredients were, so I could cross-check better: "scramble - sourdough focaccia and breakfast potatoes with a choice of strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, eggs and bacon."
This is what SideChef came up with:
Right off the bat, I was disappointed in the lack of attention to detail. The dish didn't have red bell peppers, green bell peppers, onion or potato seasoning. I don't think it had milk either, but SideChef included it. It also missed the leading flavor profiles -- strawberry butter, ricotta cheese and the sourdough focaccia.
To give SideChef the benefit of the doubt, it's hard to distinguish the sourdough focaccia because the photo doesn't show the dimpled top of the bread -- but it didn't even list sourdough.
It might've also been hard for SideChef to spot ricotta in the eggs (mistaking the creaminess for milk). It didn't even try with the strawberry butter, prompting me to buy regular butter instead.
No, I want my bougie strawberry butter. At this point, I felt like SideChef was more interested in using AI to get an affiliate commission through Walmart (the fulfillment partner).
Before I moved onto my home-cooked recipe, I tried another restaurant dish photo to test its culinary capabilities.
It was "thinking" for about 15 seconds, then I got an error. I tried again, as advised, but no luck.
Alright, SideChef, let's try this a different way. I picked my favorite dish my wife makes: sweet potato gnocchi with sausage!
I know the exact ingredients because she made a video about it:
It did a lot better this time. It got the main ingredients, but it added sun-dried tomatoes, likely because we had basil on it.
With the ingredients 90% there, I checked how the app suggested I cook it and how it was different to 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:
In SideChef's recipe, it didn't specify to remove the sweet potato jacket or clearly instruct how to prepare it. It advised us to bake the gnocchi, but we boiled it. Other than that, it was 70% there.
It depends on the recipe. It has a hard time with nuance and, like other AI tools, tends to make it up if it's unsure. It's a handy little app that could be used to inspire new ideas and ingredient concoctions or if you're in a restaurant and don't want to bother the waiter with dish details.
But for people with an ounce of skill in the kitchen, SideChef probably doesn't pose much use -- especially for cooks like my wife who wing it and feel creatively confined following recipes, let alone AI.
