In the best of times, I’m an inconsistent cook. I live alone and have a demanding job in New York, so dealing with choosing recipes, grocery shopping (which involves carrying heavy bags up and down subway stairs), and preparing meals for myself on a daily or weekly basis is exhausting. When I finish a long day, I want to lie on the couch with my eyes closed and do nothing. More often than not, as my wallet and I are ashamed to admit, I order takeout, ensuring I buy double so that I have lunch the next day. I enjoy the act of cooking and occasionally go through waves where I make dinner with friends, but motivating myself to try new recipes every week or do meal prep is challenging. I end up pulling together the same meals over and over. And when the pandemic hit, ha! Farewell to my already scant motivation.
Thanks to COVID-19, grocery shopping has grown even more stressful. Social distancing in tiny aisles is impossible, and despite all the signage, not everyone wears masks. I considered using a grocery delivery service, but this didn’t solve my challenges of having to decide what to cook, or getting stuck with a large quantity of leftover specialized ingredients. A meal-kit service, however, made perfect sense. I could avoid supermarkets, choose meals, and the precise ingredients would neatly arrive on my doorstep (well, building lobby). I’ve tried kits like Blue Apron and Sun Basket in the past, but this time, I really wanted to give Home Chef a go. Its name pops up in conversation with friends, and it’s listed as one of our best meal-delivery services. What was all the fuss about, and was is worth it? Would it save me money? Were its recipes tasty, nutritious, fresh, full of variety, easy to understand and prepare? Would it both make my life easier and bring joy back into my culinary experience, one that’s seriously taken a hit with my inability to dine indoors at my favorite restaurants?
For this review, I followed our meal-kit buying guide, based on criteria recommended by dietitians. I ordered three Home Chef meals over the course of two weeks (so, six meals total, although each meal has two servings), which I ate in lieu of my regular meals. I selected dishes I wouldn’t normally make to get out of my comfort zone of pasta and more pasta, covering a variety of meats, fishes, and vegetables. My menu: Steak with garlic-herb butter, crispy shrimp rice bowl and sriracha aioli, spinach and feta salad with Italian-avocado dressing and crispy chickpeas, salmon with brown-butter tomato relish, crispy teriyaki tofu tacos, and Brussels sprouts and brown butter risotto.
Below are my thoughts and overall takeaways of my experience with Home Chef, broken down by criteria category. Hopefully, you don’t get too hungry reading.
Customization
After I signed up for the service, I had a few factors to consider to complete my profile (also accessible by the Home Chef app):
1. How much did I want to eat per week? Options: Between two to six meals per week, with two, four, or six servings per meal. I appreciated the ability to fiddle with this number, as some weeks, I knew I’d want to eat more than others, and I’m sure this is particularly handy if you cook for more than one. For my test, I chose three meals with two servings each per week.
2. What delivery day did I prefer, and how frequently? Options: Monday, Tuesday, Friday; weekly, biweekly, monthly. I chose Monday, as I’m home all the time now anyway, and weekly.
3. What was my “taste profile”? Options to flag: Carb-conscious meals (less than 35 grams per serving), calorie-conscious meals (less than 625 calories per serving), and/or vegetarian. Additionally, I could note if there were any specific ingredients I wished to avoid including milk, wheat (hello, my gluten-free friends), peanuts, beef, soy, and more. As I don’t have allergies or particular dietary restrictions, I left my options open, though I found that when actually ordering, I could still filter the options, in case I was feeling the itch to monitor carbs or my meat intake for a certain week.
When it came time to select actual meals for order, I found the layout very straightforward. I was able to see and select meal options for up to five weeks into the future, if desired, which is nice if I want to ensure variety and plan in advance. Clicking into each menu, the meals are sectioned as such:
Meal Kits (approximately 10 to 12 options which theoretically take anywhere between 25 and 50 minutes to prepare, ranging from easy to advanced)
15-Minute Meals (options vary; I saw two options one week, six the next)
Easy Prep Meal Kits (around six options, which are ready to stick in the oven or throw together without all the prep work)
I enjoyed the breakdown within each meal item, as I could see its level of difficulty, time it would take to prepare, level of spice, how long the ingredients would stay fresh, and nutrition profile, as well as a biography of the chef who designed the meal. Within each item, I could customize what meat (or lack thereof) I wanted. I could also order raw protein packs to cook, isolated from meals, which I’m sure is useful if you’re cooking for a family.
Perhaps most importantly, my favorite option: The ability to both skip meals week to week and to pause my account (or easily unskip/unpause, should circumstances change). I was anxious that I’d get sent a backlog of meal kits, but these two features made it easy to vary my weeks. And if I forgot to order meals for a week, Home Chef would automatically send me three meals based on my taste profile.
Affordability
On a normal, non-Home Chef week, I spend (cringe) around $80 to $100 on takeout for three orders with two dishes in each—which would be somewhere around $160 to $200 for two weeks. TL;DR New York is expensive. If I shop at a supermarket for a week, that cost is more along the lines of $50 to $75—or $100 to $150 over the course of two weeks.
With Home Chef, the price varies depending on what meal I choose, the proteins I select, and my subscription choices. Each serving cost roughly between $9 and $14—so in my case, as I ordered two servings, between $18 and $28 per meal. For my trial, ultimately, each week’s subtotal was $54 with a $7 shipping charge—so, for two weeks, $122. However, with a discount code, I saved $30 both weeks, so my actual total came out to $31 per week (with $14 shipping), or $76 for both weeks.
With the discount, I saved quite a bit. But even without the discount, I found that $122 for essentially 12 meals (since I cook for just myself) was worth it. I reasoned that left to my own devices, I’d get stuck buying an entire pineapple when all I wanted was six small chunks to make fresh pineapple salsa. I’d wind up with a bushel of parsley that I’d scramble to use, when I only wanted a few stems, or a bottle of teriyaki sauce when a quarter-cup was what I really needed. In the long run, I save on the special ingredients, and on shelf space, too. Plus, I didn’t have to actually shop or measure out all the finnicky little ingredients—a huge, hard-to-overlook savings in my precious time and energy. For my situation, I felt like Home Chef was a good deal.
Order and Delivery Process
I found the order and delivery process pretty simple. Again, you have the ability to see five weeks out, so you can skip some weeks, but not others. Each week, I had until Friday to choose or change my options for the following week’s delivery (which fell on a Monday, as I elected). Home Chef ships nationwide, and I found no issue in my deliveries arriving. I was sent notifications via email to confirm my order and shipping with a tracking code, though not a delivery confirmation email.
My kits arrived in a box stuffed with recyclable insulation and cooling packs to keep raw ingredients from spoiling. These packs are quite heavy, though they can be reused or drained of their non-toxic, biodegradable gel and liners recycled. I elected to drain them, as I have no space in my freezer for bulky ice packs. The ingredients are packaged in plastic that can be recycled, as well as the cardboard box, according to Home Chef’s disposal recommendations. I struggled with feeling guilty about paper waste, especially as many recipes required the use of paper towels. Ultimately, though, I knew that I’d have wasted, regardless, as I’d get stuck with full-size ingredients I’d never use, and I appreciated the company’s nods to sustainability.
Ease of Use
I found Home Chef meals painless (a pleasure, really) to follow. The company sent a little binder to clip in their recipes as they rolled in, and inside that binder, they laid out essential tools to have on hand (pots, pans, olive oil, meat thermometer, etc.). Everything else that I needed was neatly packaged within its clearly labeled meal kit. The recipes were cleanly designed, noting what was in my kit, what I’d additionally need, how long it would take to prepare, what temperature the proteins needed to be cooked to, how quickly they needed to be cooked, and clear step-by-step directions with photos.
It usually took me around 20 more minutes to prep and cook each meal from what the recipe predicted. The steak with garlic-herb butter said it would take 35 to 45 minutes but actually took me an hour. While the recipe for crispy shrimp claimed it would take two to three minutes to sear the shrimp per side, cooking them took over 15 minutes. Granted, maybe it was because I’m not the most experienced chef, but if you’re looking to cook on a tight time frame, I’d consider either allotting a few more minutes into your schedule or the oven-ready meals.
Nutrition Profile
As dietitian Nazima Qureshi, RD, MPH, noted in our buying guide, “One of the biggest issues I have seen with meal kits is that at the surface level they may seem healthy because they have healthy ingredients, but the recipes are put together with the priority to taste good.” She recommends looking at macros and calories to see if meals are nutritionally balanced.
Before adding each meal to my cart, I scanned its ingredients and nutrition facts on the site. I found that Home Chef plainly displayed the basic facts (calories, protein, sodium, etc.) and let me toggle between carb-light, calorie-light, and veggie-only options. One thing that stuck out was sodium content. Per serving, save the salad, all of the dishes I ordered were upwards of 1,200 milligrams of sodium per serving (1,740, in the case of the crispy shrimp rice bowl). The FDA recommends limiting sodium intake to less than 2,300 milligrams per day (i.e., one teaspoon of salt), which would be tough if you combined a serving of a Home Chef meal with two more meals.
If you’re a vegetarian, there are typically around three meal kits per week that are entirely vegetarian. They include usually some sort of grain-based bowl (pasta, rice, risotto), salad, or taco. Options are limited in that regard, and with the batter and butter, perhaps not always for the extremely calorie-conscious. But what I ordered was undeniably yummy. The crispy tofu tacos were made deliciously tangy with the pineapple salsa, and the Brussels sprout risotto rich and crunchy with its touches of goat cheese and roasted pecans. Given my customary diet of Seamless, where I’m clueless about nutrition and ingredients, these meals were a welcome change. Even the creamier dishes added variety and veggies to my diet.
True to their listings, I found that each meal offered a solid two servings. If I was very, very hungry, this amounted to more like one generous serving and one baby serving to pair with a side dish later in the day—something to keep in mind if you’ve got a big appetite. In general, though, I felt full for several hours following eating.
Overall Satisfaction
Nitpicking aside, I was quite pleased with Home Chef. I went from a diet of peanut butter and penne (not together) to a professional menu. Why yes, that is me, tossing edamame into my shrimp and flipping my filet mignon, thank you. I tried techniques I’d never normally approach, such as pickling, and made my own brown-butter tomato relish and aioli. To my delight, every meal tasted wonderful. Really, all of them. My personal favorites were the crispy shrimp and the fresh, flaky salmon. Was that due in part to the sodium levels? Maybe!
Still, in a time where I’m stuck at home alone for months on end, it was comforting to turn on music and get lost in a recipe that would’ve previously intimidated me (or never crossed my mind to make). Cooking moved from the territory of chore into wellness, which is what so many people say to the point that I want to scream, but ugh, it’s true. Especially when I don’t have to do the shopping, ingredients are precisely measured so that I can toss them in without fuss, and when I’m done, a magazine-worthy meal is left on my plate, in its sweet, savory glory.
Editor’s Note: Home Chef is offering a New Year’s deal, with $90 off in total from your first four deliveries. Home Chef says all operations are working normally as of today; for more information, check out their COVID-19 information page.
Try it: www.homechef.com