Elevate Your Home Cooking with SideChef: The Ultimate All-in-One Culinary Companion

Key Points

• SideChef provides over 18,000 recipes for your dining pleasure.

• Every recipe comes with step-by-step instructions.

• SideChef's partnership with Walmart lets you shop virtually or in person to check off items as you stroll up and down the aisles.

If you need a mobile home cooking app that does almost everything you want it to do for meal time — except cook the meal — SideChef fills the bill. Wired food writer Joe Ray says, "If you're in need of a mobile app that helps with recipes, plans out meals, incorporates grocery shopping, and looks just as good on a web browser as it does on a mobile device, then you need SideChef. This home cooking app does almost everything you want it to do."

SideChef is a comprehensive meal-planning app that works on multiple platforms, from your phone to your desktop. If you find a recipe you enjoy, SideChef lets you save it and categorize it into a personal cookbook. You can organize multiple cookbooks and separate them into different categories.

SideChef makes planning meals easy. Design each day of the week with the food you want or like, and SideChef keeps track of your plan.

The app integrates major grocery store brands, such as Walmart, to enable ordering through your local store directly from SideChef. This simplifies gathering the ingredients for your next meal. It also makes wonderful recipe recommendations when you hit a mental block.

Read on for a more in-depth look at all of SideChef's features.

Recipes & Meal Plans

by SideChef

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The Culinary Playground: Exploring SideChef's Features

SideChef is free on Android and iPhone. It lets you create an account and sign in with your Gmail credentials. Most SideChef customers appreciate that it's free to use. SideChef offers a subscription service with additional features, which isn't necessary for most of the software's services.

It has numerous useful features for everyone, from a professional chef to a casual meal prepper. It unlocks over 800 culinary courses that teach new skills. Many recipes are free and offer ample variety, but the monthly fee unlocks thousands of additional recipes.

Interactive Smart Recipes

Meal planning isn't possible without recipes. SideChef provides over 18,000 recipes, making it impossible to run out of ideas. Recipes span numerous categories, such as Trending, New, and Editor's Choice. When you want something less broad, there's a search feature for specific recipes, ingredients, dietary preferences, and cost issues.

SideChef even offers specific preferences for religious restrictions or if you're visiting a region and want to use locally sourced food. SideChef offers an incredibly personalized experience.

Visual Learning: Step-by-Step Photos and Videos

The biggest benefit to subscribing to SideChef is its collection of videos for users. This is where you learn why it's called "SideChef." It's like having a personal culinary assistant in the kitchen. Even if you have zero experience in the kitchen, SideChef lets you cook like a master chef.

Every recipe includes a visual aid, either images or instructional videos showing what the meal looks like at every stage of the cooking process. Some instructional videos link to YouTube, making viewing easy for everyone.

SideChef employees create some visual aids, but many come from bloggers and contributors who run websites. Contributor-sourced content gives the cooking process a human touch rather than a corporate one. These contributors share techniques for such things as dicing onions and how to be a more efficient chef.

Seamless Cooking Experience: Tools at Your Fingertips

SideChef displays a recipe and directions and also reads the directions to you, so follow along step-by-step without touching your device and breaking your concentration. Beginners especially benefit from the step-by-step cooking instruction.

If a recipe is too difficult, pressing a button to simplify it makes it easy enough for a toddler to cook — but don't let your toddler cook. They're not tall enough and can't read.

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SideChef provides a built-in timer, so you don't have to switch apps to use your phone's timer or fumble in kitchen cabinets looking for an egg time. It's another way the app simplifies everything for you.

Shoppable Recipes: Culinary Convenience at its Best

One of the best features of SideChef is the ability to grocery shop directly from the app. Add items to a shopping cart as you peruse its thousands of recipes. It lets you shop virtually with Walmart and have your items delivered, or use the in-store shopping feature to check off items as you put them in your cart.

When you buy ingredients, the app separates them under appropriate categories, such as meat and vegetables. It also combats duplicate items by bulking them together instead of adding each item individually. It's a very intuitive system.

Since Instacart started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2023, there may be a partnership for these two brands to make. Of course, that's only speculation, but imagine the versatility of a cooking app that integrates Instacart into its system.

A Culinary Ecosystem: SideChef's Strategic Partnerships

Besides WalMart, SideChef also partners with various smart appliance manufacturers to connect you to the "kitchen OS." This OS links the apps, websites, cloud, and cooking appliances.

There are some drawbacks to SideChef, specifically to the contributor oversight. It's common to see typos or inaccurate measurements. An entire step is sometimes left out of the directions. Proceed with caution when reading through directions.

Recipes & Meal Plans

by SideChef

Learn More

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

The Cooking Assistant in Your Pocket

SideChef provides a wonderful selection of recipes with even better suggestions. The videos and photos are ideal kitchen companions, especially with the voice assistant mode that reads to you. SideChef eliminates the need to call your mom or chef best friend when you need help cooking for friends.

Its premium subscription is affordable, coming in at the price of a cup of coffee, and opens up features that elevate your cooking experience. However, SideChef can benefit from more oversight of the content provided by bloggers to offer more accuracy.

SideChef is shaping the future of home cooking through its dynamic approach. If you want to improve your culinary skills and aren't sure how to go about it, download SideChef, try it for a couple of weeks, and experience its benefits.

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