Tired of Eating Out? I Tested This AI Recipe Maker Tool To Make Homemade Food

I’m a picky eater but a funny cook. Luckily, I live in New York City, where it’s cool enough to cook and there are plenty of dining options. I’m spoiled for choice, with some of the best restaurants in the world right next to my house.

I have tried to recreate some of my favorite dishes but I fail with simple dishes. So when I heard that there is artificial intelligence a program that can turn any photo into a secret, I had to try it.

SideChef’s RecipeGen AI software is a home cooking platform and online store. The new beta AI allows chefs (or would-be chefs) to take pictures each one eating at a restaurant or on social media, and it promises to make it one way.

I wanted to see how accurate the ingredients were and how close they would be to the restaurants I’ve been to recently.

SideChef is an award-winning marketing app that’s been around since 2013, and its RecipeGen AI feature launched this month as a home cooking app. It is free to download and use.

This is going!

From sous-chef to SideChef

The preparation was easy. I have downloaded it SideChef app on my phone and click Add itthat’s it Make a Recipe From a Picture. You can take a photo directly in the app or choose a photo from your library.

To check the accuracy of SideChef, I wanted to test two methods:

1. Upload a picture of the food I ate at a restaurant.
2. Upload a picture of the food I ate at home (because I know what I put in).

For the restaurant meal, I chose a basic brunch dish to make it easy for SideChef to understand. We had brunch at Malibu Farm on a recent trip to California, where they stock breakfast items like sweet butter and sourdough.

I looked at the menu to see what was on it, so I could get a good look: “wrap – sourdough focaccia with breakfast potatoes and a choice of strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, eggs and bacon.”

Here’s what SideChef came up with:

At that point, I was disappointed by the lack of attention to detail. The dish did not contain red bell peppers, green peppers, onions or sweet potatoes. I don’t think it contained milk either, but SideChef included it. It also missed out on the best of the best – 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 picture doesn’t show the top of the bread — but it doesn’t mention sourdough.

It would also be difficult for SideChef to see the ricotta in the eggs (mistaken for the flavor of the milk). Didn’t try it with strawberry butter, which led me to buy regular butter instead.

No, I want my strawberry butter. At this point, I felt like SideChef was interested in using AI to find a partner service through Walmart (a fulfillment partner).

Before I moved on to my home cooking recipe, I tried another photo of a dinner plate to test its cooking skills.

This time, Ramen!

I have uploaded this image:

It was “thinking” for about 15 seconds, then I was wrong. I tried again, as advised, but no luck.

Well, SideChef, let’s try this a different way. I took my wife’s favorite dish: potato gnocchi with sausage!

I know the ingredients because they made a video about it:

• Sweet potato
• An egg
• Powder
• Sausage
• Mushrooms
• Butter
• Soup
• Parmesan

This is going!

Now we are cooking.

It worked really well this time. It had the basics, but added sun-dried tomatoes, probably because we had basil.

With the ingredients 90% there, I looked at how the program suggested I cook and how different it was from what we normally do.

SideChef said:

SideChef made the recipe more complicated than it needed to be. Here are seven easy steps:

• Heat the potatoes, cut them in half, remove the jacket and crush them in a bowl.
• Add one egg and beat.
• Add a cup of flour and mix.
• Cut the potato dough into four pieces, fold each into a thin strip, then cut small pieces of gnocchi.
• Put the sausage on the frying pan. Add mushrooms, butter and sauce.
• Boil the gnocchi, then transfer to a frying pan to cool.
• Sprinkle with Parmesan.

In the SideChef recipe, it never mentions removing the potato jacket or clearly advises how to prepare it. He advised us to cook gnocchi, but we boiled it. After all, he was 70% there.

A chef’s kiss?

It depends on the recipe. It’s complicated by nuance and, like other AI tools, they can fix it if not confirmed. It’s a handy little app that can be used to inspire new ideas and concoctions or if you’re in a restaurant and don’t want to bother the waiter with the details of the dishes.

But for people with more experience in the kitchen, SideChef might not be of much use — especially for cooks like my wife who wing it and feel stuck following recipes, let alone AI.