Tired of eating out? I’ve been experimenting with this AI recipe creation tool to create a restaurant meal at home

I’m a serious foodie but I’m a funny cook. Fortunately, I live in New York City, where it’s okay not to cook and there are endless options for eating out. I’m spoiled for choice in cooking, with some of the world’s best restaurants within walking distance of my home.

I tried to recreate my favorite foods but was unable to deliver even the simplest dishes. So when I heard that there was artificial intelligence An app that turns any photo into a recipe, I had to try it.

SideChef’s RecipeGen AI app It is an online home cooking and grocery platform. A new beta AI feature lets chefs (or wannabe chefs) take a photo any In a restaurant or on social media, promising to create a step-by-step recipe instantly.

I wanted to see how precise the ingredients were and how close they were to a restaurant meal I had recently had.

SideChef is an award-winning recipe shopping platform that has been in the market since 2013, and RecipeGen AI launched this month as a step-by-step home cooking app. It’s free to download and use.

Here it goes!

From Sous Chef to SideChef

Setup was simple. I have downloaded Side Chef application On my phone and click on He addsthen Generate recipe from image. You can either take a photo directly in the app or choose one from your library.

To test SideChef’s accuracy, I wanted to try two methods:

1. Upload a photo of a meal you ate at restaurant.
2. Upload a photo of the meal you ate house (Because I know exactly what I put into it).

For the restaurant meal, I chose a starter-friendly dish to make it easier to decipher on SideChef. We were having lunch at Malibu Ranch On their recent trip to California, they put a new twist on breakfast staples like sweet butter and sourdough.

I checked the menu to see the ingredients, so I could verify better: “Scrambled bread – sourdough pancakes and breakfast potatoes with choice of strawberry or basil butter. Kale, spinach, ricotta, egg and bacon.”

This is what SideChef came up with:

Immediately, 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 listed it. They also missed the main flavors – strawberry buttercream, ricotta cheese and sourdough focaccia.

To give SideChef the benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to tell the difference between sourdough focaccia because the photo doesn’t show the top of the bread — but it doesn’t even mention sourdough.

It may also have been difficult for SideChef to detect the ricotta in the eggs (thinking it had a creamy consistency). And I didn’t even try using strawberry butter, which prompted me to buy regular butter instead.

No, I want strawberry butter. At this point, I felt like SideChef was more interested in using AI to earn an affiliate commission through Walmart (the fulfillment partner).

Before I moved on to my home-cooked recipe, I tried out another restaurant dish to test its culinary abilities.

This time, ramen!

I uploaded this image:

I was “thinking” for about 15 seconds, then I got an error. I tried again, as you advised, but no luck.

Okay, SideChef, let’s try this a different way. 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 potatoes
• egg
• precise
• sausage
• Mushrooms
• Obesity
• broth
• Parmesan

Here it goes!

Now we are cooking.

He did much better this time. She got the main ingredients, but added sun-dried tomatoes, probably because we had basil on them.

With the ingredients at 90%, I checked how the app suggested cooking it and how it was different from how we actually did it.

SideChef Suggested:

In fact, SideChef made the recipe more complicated than it needed to be. It’s seven simple steps:

• Heat the sweet potatoes, cut them in half, remove the wrappers and mash them in a bowl.
• Add one egg and beat.
• Add a cup of flour and mix.
• Cut the sweet potato dough into four pieces, roll each piece into a thin rope, then cut into small gnocchi pieces.
• Cook the sausages over the skillet. Add mushrooms, butter, and broth.
• Boil the gnocchi, then add them to the pan to cook slightly.
• Sprinkle with parmesan.

In the SideChef recipe, there is no specification of removing the sweet potato jacket or clear instructions on how to prepare it. She advised us to bake the gnocchi, but we boiled them. Otherwise, there were 70%.

Chef’s kiss?

It depends on the recipe. It has difficulty dealing with nuance, and like other AI tools, Tends to make it If not sure. It’s a handy little app that can be used to inspire new ideas and ingredient combinations or if you’re at a restaurant and don’t want to bother the waiter with the details of a dish.

But for people with little skill in the kitchen, SideChef probably isn’t much use — especially for cooks like my wife who are proficient at it and feel creatively limited by recipes, let alone AI.