Visual appeal is just as important for a cooking app as it is for your favorite dishes. On that note, SideChef looks great on mobile devices and in the browser, and stands tall as one of the most attractive cooking apps we’ve tested. Even better, it has excellent recipe suggestions, an intuitive meal-planning system, and incorporates grocery shopping into its kit for easy online ordering. Unfortunately, SideChef lacks a pantry system to help you take stock of kitchen items, and it doesn’t let you edit recipes. For those valuable features and more, check out Paprika, our Editors’ Choice pick for cooking apps.
Getting Started with SideChef
SideChef is free to download and use on Android and iOS devices, and is accessible via a web browser. You can create an account from scratch, or sign in using your existing Google credentials. After that, you’re asked about your dietary preferences, intolerances or allergies, and eating goals. The goals include eating healthy, budget-friendly cooking, quick and easy meals, or learning to cook. When done, you can jump into the app to begin your recipe searching, or start planning meals.
SideChef’s subscription costs $4.99 per month, but the company doesn’t push it as hard as other cooking apps we’ve tested . By subscribing, you enjoy exclusive videos and recipes. Chefling and Yummly’s subscriptions are also $4.99 per month; BigOven is $2.99 per month; and Paprika, the PCMag Editors’ Choice pick for cooking apps, is a one-time, $4.99 purchase on mobile devices (it costs $29.99 on desktop).
Attractive Visual Design
SideChef utilizes a similar layout as Chefling, with large image panels that showcase the app’s many recipes. You scroll up or down to see the various categories, and swipe left or right to see the particular recipes within said list. The app’s top features the Daily Inspiration category, a selection of recipes based on your preferences.
As you scroll down, you’ll come across meal lists, including Brunch Ideas, Trending Recipes, Easy Family Meals, SideChef Originals, Airfryer Cooking, and 30-Minute Dinners. These recipe combine meals pulled from the web, along with original SideChef offerings. The result is a tight, easy-to-use interface, with a visual design that ranks among the best-looking cooking apps we’ve reviewed.
SideChef’s Grocery Options
SideChef automatically identifies a recipe’s ingredients, and adds them to your grocery cart. Like Yummly, SideChef lets your order ingredients online. It features Walmart integration, so your food items are sourced from your nearest Walmart location. You can modify the items if you have them in your pantry, and schedule a delivery or in-store pickup. My local Walmart is not particularly close, so my items took a day to ship. That wasn’t as expedient as Yummly’s same-day option via Instacart. Still, it’s a convenient feature that few other cooking apps offer.
That said, SideChef is a little overeager to get you to order groceries. You see, SideChef segregates the shopping cart ingredients and the recipe ingredients on the recipe cards. The ingredients list features the quantities and measurements for the food items in a recipe, while the shopping cart features the items as reflected from the nearest Walmart. You can swap between these lists with a button press, but SideChef prioritizes the shopping list. As a result, you must take that extra step to see the critical recipe information. Yummly, on the other hand, lists the ingredients and measurements by default, and offers a button for you to add the items to the shopping cart.
Unfortunately, SideChef lacks a digital pantry. This is a major disappointment, as a pantry system is an invaluable tool for any kitchen assistant. Managing your inventory is vital for mitigating food waste, and taking charge of your grocery shopping needs. SideChef’s grocery function keeps track of potential items you may own, depending on what you’ve previously placed in your shopping cart. Still, this pales in comparison to a proper, customizable pantry system. Yummly also lacks a digital pantry, but the feature is currently in development. Hopefully SideChef does the same in the near future.
Handy Video Content
The biggest benefit to subscribing are the premium recipes, a robust selection of video-guided meals similar to Yummly’s Pro videos. Like Yummly, SideChef’s videos offer step-by-step cooking instructions, making it a fantastic visual guide for inexperienced and novice chefs. SideChef also includes timer settings and visual guides to walk you through the cooking process.
BigOven includes video content, but these are bite-sized videos and guided recipes. Chefling lets subscribers save video recipes from YouTube, but doesn’t provide its own video content.
Managing Recipes
SideChef lets you save recipes you find, and categorize them into cookbooks that you can organize however you see fit. The default book is Favorites, but you can make as many as you like. I put all my Asian-American dishes into one cookbook, created another for Latin recipes, and another for fried foods. There’s no limit to the cookbooks you can create, nor is there a limit to how many recipes you can include in each one. This is a wonderful feature that I would like to see used in other cooking apps.
Unfortunately, you’re only limited to in-app recipes. There’s no way to import recipes into SideChef as you can with Chefling, BigOven, and Paprika. You can manually enter your own recipes into the app, but you can’t pull them from the web and save them. Archiving, editing, and customizing recipes are commonplace among cooking apps, and highly useful when experimenting in the kitchen. Cooks should have access to editing tools to create notes or swap ingredients or measurements. Likewise, you should be able to save recipes you like in one place with ease. It is a shame SideChef does not offer this in any real capacity.
Fun With Meal Plans
SideChef has the standard features you would expect from a cooking app, such as adding or removing recipes to your calendar list. SideChef spices this up by offering personalized meal suggestions based on your preferences for each day of the week, giving you choices to consider as you edit your planner. You can easily remove these suggestions, and add recipes of your liking. This is an especially useful feature if you’re feeling adventurous in the kitchen.
Modifying your meal plan is as easy as clicking the add button for any given day. This opens a small window where you can choose from your saved recipes, or search for a new one. Click the meal you like, and its instantly added to the plan. SideChef’s meal-planning system, much like Chefling and Paprika’s, is extremely easy to use, which makes developing a menu fun and addictive.
Cooking With SideChef
Unfortunately, recipe directions are displayed below the ingredients list, which means you must frequently scroll down as you cook to see the next steps. Paprika and Chefling have convenient Ingredient and Direction buttons that let you swap between the two lists with ease. This is useful since you won’t want to manipulate your mobile device too much while cooking. On the upside, you can easily scale a recipe by tapping the plus or minus buttons, and swap between US and metric measurements. SideChef also prevents your phone from going into sleep mode while reading recipes, which is a handy feature to have while cooking.
Some web-specific recipes don’t feature in-app directions; instead, you’re given a Directions button that takes you to the original recipe’s website for further instruction. This is an irritating feature that BigOven and Yummly also possess, and it only adds more scrolling to the recipe-reading process.
SideChef requires an internet connection to use. Without one, you cannot peruse the app’s many recipe suggestions, view the recipes you’ve saved, or update the meal planner. This limitation is fairly common among cooking apps, with Paprika being the stand-out exception.
A Good-Looking Cooking Assistant
SideChef features a gorgeous interface, excellent recipe suggestion systems, fantastic video content, and a convenient grocery-shopping tool. However, it lacks a proper pantry system, as well as recipe-editing functionality—significant letdowns. If you’re willing to forgo the video guides and recipe suggestion, Paprika (PCMag’s Editors’ Choice pick for cooking apps) gives you an excellent tool set for collecting, editing, and archiving your favorite online recipes for a one-time, $4.99 fee.
