Review: SideChef

The other day at my mother-in-law's house, I roasted a chicken in her 20-year-old oven and, at one point, turned on the oven light with the flick of an analog switch. There were no beeps, no series of buttons to press, no app to fire up, just a pleasing click and immediate light on the bird. Similarly, I used one knob on the oven to select "Bake," and another to dial up the temperature. Everything happened quickly to get dinner rolling, making it a weirdly refreshing analog experience.

Many apps on the market now look to make cooking a connected experience. Sometimes, as in the case of the ThermoWorks Smoke thermometer it just makes sense—an app that connects to a hardware gadget can help you understand what's happening with whatever you're cooking. A good recipe app like the New York Times Cooking app can provide a convenient way to figure out dinner on your commute home. A fair amount of the time, an app adds little to no value to the experience, leading me to question why companies bother.

SideChef, an app with a supporting website, lands in the middle of this thicket. It features thousands of recipes with step-by-step photos or videos to guide you through them. Some are created in-house, but most come from contributors with blogs and websites that are linked to atop each recipe. Embedded techniques—from boiling water and dicing a pepper to more advanced options—are often there if you need a quick refresher course. The recipes scale up or down with the press of a button, and there are built-in timers for the steps that need them. A computer voice reads through the step when you first look at it.

SideChef is also partnering with smart appliance manufacturers, providing an open platform for the connected kitchen. This linking between an app or website, the cloud, and the appliances you cook with is known as the "Kitchen OS," a space that along with SideChef, is being occupied by companies like Innit, Drop, and Yummly. The open platform, which not all companies are opting for, allows you to mix and match gadgets from different manufacturers like you've always done and if they're connected, corral them into one app instead of several, sort of like a mashup between a universal remote and a cookbook. It also keeps you from being railroaded into buying everything from one manufacturer.

For now though, the SideChef has partnerships are in place, but the hardware and handshaking haven't hit the market. Until then, the company has an impressive amount of souped up recipes—north of 5,000—allowing the company to build up a following and for users to kick the tires. Content is king—or at least one of them—in the smart kitchen game, and SideChef has plenty of it. Another key the company nails is that the recipes tend to be good-looking, thanks to some solid photography. Also, the selection is not too highbrow; Many of the most popular recipes are for meals like chicken parm, grilled cheese, or all things breakfast.

I just wish SideChef had an editor and a recipe tester.

One of the first recipes I scanned through was "Soy Sauce Noodles," number 169 on a list of the top 500 recipes a company rep sent to me. I thought it was laudable for its simplicity and stated 15-minute cook time, and, hey, sometimes that's just about all you've got in the cupboard and you're hungry.

My heart kinda sank when I started reading it, though, as I noticed that the list of ingredients called for "sliced onion," leaving the home chef to ponder questions like, "How thick," and, looking at the photos, "Who taught that person how to slice onions?" As I scrolled from step one (prepping the sauce) to step two (frying the cooked noodles) I kept thinking I was missing the "cooking the noodles" part, but I hadn't; that part was just left out of the recipe.

I shrugged it off and officially took the plunge with shepherd's pie, a nostalgic wonder of a dish that a site like this should just own, especially as it occupies slot 26 in the top 500. The first thing I noticed, though, was the call for "three peeled, cubed new potato."

Did they mean "new potato" like the little fresh potatoes available in the spring? Three of those certainly wouldn't be enough. Did they mean three pounds? How large are those cubes? More questions for the home cook to work out on their own.

I ran into similar problems further into the cooking process, like a lack of pan space when browning the meat (I was following the default recipe, which serves six) and an instruction to "heat until the butter is melted and is hot to the touch."

Again, I paused. Touch the butter? Is that with a clean finger? Has it healed since the last time it was stuck into hot oil?

The recipe writer seemed content in their disregard for recipe-writing convention, but for those of us who cook with recipes and follow them religiously, poorly written ones are betrayals. I figured I'd poke around on the site a bit more to make sure I hadn't just picked the only two duds on the site, and the first recipe I opened, Beef Kebabs with Sautéed Red Cabbage and Rice, started with this step: "Wash, and thinly slice the Small Onion and Ground Beef. Thoroughly mix the Sausage Seasoning and Small red cabbage." [sic]

Hmm. Wash the onion? Wash the ground beef? Slice the ground beef? Since nothing's happened to the cabbage yet, maybe chop it up a bit before mixing it with something else?

Pass.

I asked about SideChef's relationship with its content providers, and while a company rep's two-sentence response talked about "love" and "empowerment," there was no mention of money. Sigh. Since most the recipes on SideChef's app receive no remuneration, my beef isn't with the recipe writers, it's with the company's lack of oversight.

Recipe writing and testing are their own little art forms with rules that help ensure success. Cookbooks with errors get thrown away. Poor quality recipe apps get deleted. Without editing or testing even its most popular recipes, SideChef's initial foray is essentially an upscale crowdsourcing operation that can't hold a candle to a good-quality cookbook.

There's a lot to like in the concept of the SideChef app. Pulling up a little video that demonstrates how to chiffonade basil can be very helpful. An open-source hub for smart kitchen products is an extremely alluring second act. To do this, though, SideChef needs fantastic content, and the company should probably either do it in house or make sure its partner content is bulletproof. And, what the heck, why not pay those contributors for their work?

It all made me think back to of the simplicity of my mother-in-law's oven light—that little switch is surprisingly effective. If SideChef wants to keep its users once the company starts implementing its open-source plan, its app must be just as effective as the analog alternative: a good cookbook.

Food writer Joe Ray (@joe_diner) is a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of The Year, a restaurant critic, and author of "Sea and Smoke" with chef Blaine Wetzel.

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