Review: SideChef—The Guided-Cooking App Has Thousands Of Recipes, But Needs An Editor.
WIRED—March 20, 2018
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.
Do you really need to fire up your phone to cook something? Probably not, but read on to make sure in WIRED.
