You pick a group of 3 recipes at once and use all perishable ingredients across those recipes so you don't end up with a bunch of stuff going bad in your fridge because you've no clue what to do with it.
They have a wide variety of vegetarian recipes and multiple types of cuisine.
The app reads each step out loud. This makes it rather harder to get distracted mid-step or miss a step, etc. You do a step, click done, and then it reads the next step aloud.
Timers are embedded in the recipe, appearing when you need them.
When a timer goes off, instead of just being a noise, it tells you exactly what it is for and what you should be looking for in the dish (e.g., "That's the timer for your spaghetti. They should be soft with a slight bite").
Every recipe includes veg (maybe 1 doesn't that I've made? A cheesy thing. But even then, I think I blended in cauliflower...). When I'm just throwing stuff together in my kitchen, I usually struggle to include vegetables. Sorted recipes always have something vegetal in them (plus they've given me ideas for how to include veg for quick cooking too).
None of the steps are super hard, and the recipes always taste good (with one notable exception; there is a tray bake that has been an utter failure every time I've tried it).
Instead of having to make a big decision about food when it is time to cook, you just have to look at your chosen pack for the week and decide which of the three options you're going to make that night. This makes cooking rather less stressful.
If you need to eat cheaply for a week or two, they have multiple recipe packs (3 recipes, at least 2 servings each) that use only 5 or 7 ingredients per recipe. These can be super cost-effective.
Every step includes a photo that usually relates to the step (there have been a few places where they don't; maybe those were older recipes and they're making do, I don't know).
Or, if you have a question about it that I've missed covering, I honestly don't know how that happened.
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I've been using the Sidekick app for about eight months now, so I wanted to write a review - all the thoughts that have come to me as I use it (and I probably do use it three weeks out of every four), so you can decide if it'd work for you.
Firstly, I never planned to get a year's subscription. I planned to let my free month trial roll over for a paid second month, but it charged me for a year straight off. So that's point one to be aware of if you do a free trial. More under the cut because this got LENGTHY.
Ethos
The thinking behind the app, I really like. Using ingredients over multiple meals to prevent waste? An obvious move, but not something I'm great at when left to my own devices!
Having said that, sometimes the amount of ingredient used feels unnecessary - you could use less crème fraiche or fewer herbs for the same result, but we'll use it all because then we've used up the pack (even if dinner now looks like the compost heap after my Dad's mowed the back lawn).
I also really like that nutritional information for the meals is available, but has to be turned on. It's not always good to be looking at calorie counts, especially if you're vulnerable to disordered eating, so having that opt-in instead of opt-out is great.
The calorie counts often feel high for what the meal is, though, and a lot of that is probably the amounts of oil and butter used. So if this is a consideration for you, a quick tip - it's unnecessary most of the time. You can probably halve it, or do two thirds, and be fine.
Quantities
Speaking of, I realise the recipes have been developed by the kitchen team, which from what we've seen in the Sorted videos seems to be all male? So maybe that's driving it, but I eat a reasonable amount - I'm definitely not bird-like or have a 'small appetite' - yet I often get three meals out of every cook (I've got it set to two people, as I like leftovers). Sometimes I even get four decent portions!
When you've then got three meals to make, you're generating anything from six up to twelve portions for the week, or drifting into the following week and hoping the ingredients haven't gone off.
This is more cost-effective and lowers the high calorie counts, but means eating a lot of the same thing. (I could eat down my freezer enough to fit things in it again and save them for later, but hey.) It also means there's no real opportunity, for me and how I end up using the app, of a one-off cook (e.g. pancakes on pancake day, or something I'm randomly craving), but am instead very tied to the pack.
Recipe design
The quality of the recipes is key! And I would say it's usually fair to good - most get 3 or 4 stars out of 5 from me.
I've cooked 47 recipes so far, and there have been a couple that were very bland and needed doctoring, and maybe 6 or 7 really delicious ones I want to keep for life. (There's an amazing mushroom gochujang udon dish, a really easy halloumi tray bake, and a lamb and feta orzo (that I twist and add some extra veg to) that's great.)
I live in the UK, so am closely aligned to what the recipe creators will have available. I'd like to see potential substitute info added, though. (For ages my local supermarket didn't stock ciabatta, which is used in loads of their recipes, and I can only imagine this is more of an issue for those living elsewhere.) The app allows users to post 'twists', so that can be helpful where other people have faced the same issue, but this feels like a relatively easy addition that would be valuable for everyone, but especially those with allergies or more restricted access to global foods. It would also be helpful for vegetarians - if a chicken recipe would work equally well with tofu, you've widened your veggie (or even vegan) recipe offering.
I also find that pack sizes listed don't always match those in the supermarket, but working across multiple stores and serving sizes must be a nightmare (and that's before you consider multiple countries!), so I'll let them off that one 😉
Their shopping list function (which tells you exactly what you need for the week's recipes, and you can check off as you go along) is really clear and easy - it's such a valuable function. Having an extra step of possible substitutes that you could feed through to it would just be the icing on top.
I'm an omnivore, but I'd also like more variety in the make-up of the packs. If you get a "meat" pack you're likely eating meat every day (and the amount of meat per person is normally too high for me - I'll often halve it and sub in some veg, as in the meat meals the veg content can be pretty low). They also often do themed packs - a pasta pack or a Mexican pack - and as someone using this pack for the week, I'd prefer the variety of more packs where you get one Mexican dish, one pasta dish, and one other dish all in the same pack, rather than eating pasta for every meal. (I realise it's designed to be three meals out of a week, but even so, that's a fair amount of pasta, and I love pasta.) More recently released packs do seem to address this a bit more, so maybe it's feedback they've already received.
It might be worth knowing there are currently 110 recipes tagged vegan and 433 tagged vegetarian - so a pretty decent range!
Recipe steps are listed in order, obviously. But these don't always seem the most sensible order - e.g., you boil a kettle right at the beginning, but by the time you get to needing hot water thirty minutes later, you kind of need to re-boil it. Putting that step later on would be more logical. Sometimes things overcook because there wasn't enough time to fit in all the later steps and have things be ready at the same time. You can get around this to an extent by reading through the recipe first and applying common sense/your own cooking expertise, but the app seems designed to do this sort of thing for you and be a real 'beginners and up' tool - it just doesn't quite work in all instances.
Recipes highlight what equipment you need, which is so helpful! A word of advice, though, that their 'medium frying pan' is my largest frying pan. 'Small' is not one of those single-egg frying pans - I don't think they acknowledge the existence of those🤣 Whenever it says a large frying pan, I use a casserole dish, or it WILL end up all over my hob.
Also ensure you have pans that can go from hob to grill/oven, and a mini chopper. They seem able to blend things with a hand blender that I will never manage, but the mini chopper saves me. And you will need it, as a number of the packs include at least one sauce or soup or pesto, so it would take some dodging to only do recipes that don't need pureeing in some fashion. Honestly though - what witchcraft powers their stick blender?
Final thought on recipes - wouldn't it be cool if they include an option to add dessert?
'Benefits'?
The advertising of the app - when they talk about it in their videos - often emphasises there are no "use up" meals. I would disagree with that; in some packs there's a clear shoehorned third to get through the odds and ends! Which is fine, that's how it works sometimes, but own it 😀
Another selling point they promote is that using the app will save you money - this is, of course, all relative. Using a wider variety of ingredients (some of them more specialist) is likely to increase your shop cost, especially in the short term. Similarly, personally the app has encouraged me to eat more meat than I might otherwise just because of what looked good, but that is more expensive. So take that selling point with a pinch of salt, depending on your current eating habits and recipe choices!
The app is great at getting you to try ingredients and recipes you might not have gone to before, though, so for getting out of a cooking rut (which I was in!), it's fantastic. Sometimes this is forced - you get that third recipe you're not sure about (hello corn and kimchi lasagne) along with the two that look really good! - but also just knowing that you'll be told exactly what you need to do makes it easier to take that risk and try new things. (And that lasagne was actually pretty decent, for sounding so weird.)
Timings
In terms of skill level, I would say I'm a middling cook - I'm not a beginner, but also no chef. I can and will go off piste and create decent things from scratch. I've been cooking for myself for over a decade. I'll host friends for dinner and not panic about it. But - and I touched on this earlier with prep taking longer - I can't cook Sidekick recipes in the time allotted!
Are these timings based on the Sorted food team? Their knife skills are going to be better than mine. So are the normals', as after however many years with chef-directed instruction, they're not actually normal any more. I'd appreciate more realistic timings, accounting for the fact that most people will have to get the ingredient out of their cupboard, and weigh it out, and maybe remove the cat from the countertop. Even aside from this kind of time slip, their estimates for how long X takes to brown, or Y takes to boil, always seem too low. If they say Z is cooked now, it probably needs a few more minutes.
I don't know, I'd just prefer a recipe say it takes 40 minutes and it takes 30, than it take an hour, and it's always the latter for me. Probably that's personal preference and other people would find the opposite more annoying. But Sidekick timings given seem to be the absolute quickest possible time, and who is a) able or b) wants to cook at superspeed after a long day?
The app itself
It's really nicely designed and inviting to use, and has several useful features such as being able to guide it's recommendations via marking favourite cuisines, diet types of vegetarian/vegan/pescatarian only, and adding your allergies, dislikes and intolerances. You can also search by ingredient or by cooking time, and packs are coloured according to diet type, so it's really easy to spot veggie or meat or fish packs.
Using it to cook along - the app automatically keeps your phone screen active, which is good. It also includes timers you can set for each stage, really handy, although a niggle I've noticed is that you can't see multiple timers at once without clicking out of the main recipe, and sometimes you will have mutliple going (or one finished, but they don't automatically disappear).
I don't use the voiceover option, but I can see the value in it and having different ways to follow a recipe is cool.
Also great - new recipes are released weekly, so there's always something new!
However, the app is glitchy. Several times it's crashed while rating a recipe, which sometimes pops up a while after you cooked it, as you're trying to cook the next one. It's never yet prevented me from being able to cook (or shop), but it's been close a few times and would be pretty disastrous if you're standing in your kitchen trying to get dinner on the table!
Final thoughts
So. Will I renew my subscription for another year? At this point, I'm not sure. The app makes it easy to eat more variety, easy to choose a week's menu 'in one', easy to shop using the auto-generated shopping list. But I sometimes feel tied in by it, and I'd like a higher hit rate of 'this is delicious' recipes to justify the cost. At the moment I'm leaning towards cancel... we'll see if that changes by April.
If you got to the end of this actual essay (I didn't realise I had SO much to say), congratulations on your staying power! I'm very fond of the Sorted crew since I discovered their YouTube channel about a year ago, and I hope you've found this fair, balanced, and helpful.
Do you subscribe to Sidekick? Or do you want to try it out? 💖
New app SIDEKICK lets you text locals for travel advice in Korea and Japan — Lonely Planet
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— by Andrea Smith: Travelling abroad can be tricky if you don’t read or speak the language, but a new app that works via your favourite chat app will let you text locals for travel advice in Korea and Japan.
Sidekick has been launched by Scott Barrow and Jungwon Yang, two former Samsung colleagues, after years of travel between the US and Korea. They grew to appreciate…
