January 2016 Home Chef Dinner Subscription Box Review & $30 Coupon

Home Chef is a dinner in a box subscription – every week choose from a variety of recipes and have all the ingredients and preparation instruction delivered to your door.  It’s similar to other weekly meal delivery services  like Hello Fresh and Plated but like all of them, has its own unique features and perspectives. (We don’t typically review Blue Apron – in the past we’ve found it extremely fussy, with small portion sizes).

When you sign up you fill out a mini profile of your family and tastes so Home Chef can automatically suggest a weekly menu for you, which you are welcome to change. The selections for this meal subscription are much larger than the other ones, offering 10 selections available for 2, 4, or 6 people, a breakfast choice, a smoothie choice, and a fruit basket selection. Currently this is the least expensive and has the most choice out of any similar major subscriptions (for 2 people), so we had to give it a try.

Your weekly parcel contains your recipe cards and all the ingredients for your meals. Everything arrived bundled inside insulated packaging with big ice packs to keep it cold.

The meat is placed in the bottom of box and packed with several ice packs.

We were really impressed with the recipe choices — there are tons of options!  We also thought the meals were more accessible than the other meal kit subscription boxes, which tend to use lots of ancient grains, alternative greens, exotic spices, and likes to target the foodie crowd.  This subscription has plenty of flavor and variety, but it uses more familiar ingredients.

The recipe cards have all the info we like to see — prep time, difficulty, and allergen and nutrition info.  They also included a drink pairing suggestion (something other boxes have dabbled in but not stuck with), and a “best cooked by” time frame.  We like this way of stating the fridge stability of the ingredients (instead of simply telling us to eat the fish first), as it allows us to plan our order of meals however we want, while still optimizing freshness.

The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures and boldfacing of ingredients.  The instructions were clear and complete, and I found them to be very thorough.  There was an inventory of ingredients provided, a listing of tools and items you provide (mainly S+P and oil), and the recipes had great hints littered throughout — they even help you expand your cooking vocabulary, like explaining what a “nappe” sauce looks like — basically translating French cooking terminology in layman’s terms when relevant to the recipe.  The only minor annoyance is the adherence to standard prep order (i.e.:  preheat oven, chop veg, prep meat) — we switch the order a bit where it makes sense. If you’re an experienced cook we do recommend cooking in the most efficient order, but for novices we recommend following the directions exactly so you don’t get flustered or lose your place. The recipe cards have pre-punched holes so you can store them in a recipe binder.

Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag.

Italian Sausage Stromboli With Spinach, Mozzarella, and Pepperoncini. 40 mins, expert, 1187 calories.

These were really good, and the recipe made a TON of food.  I shifted much of the filling to one of the stromboli, leaving the other with cheese and sauce for the kids.  The stromboli with the toppings was huge, but they both cooked well in the same amount of time.  We fed two adults and two kids, and we had some leftovers, too.  The sausage was a tad on the salty side, and my doubling up accentuated that characteristic.  Still, very tasty.  The braiding technique was easy to do, particularly because the dough was so forgiving.  Greek yogurt, olive oil, and flour were used to make an instant pizza dough — amazingly, the flavor, texture, and workability were all great.  This was the easiest from-scratch stromboli recipe I’ve seen, and the result was excellent.

The dough held up to the bulging toppings superbly.  

Truffled Grilled Cheese with Tomato Soup With Swiss and Cheddar on Sourdough. 35 mins, easy, 900 calories. Whoops, they forgot the Truffled oil, which was a bit of a bummer. This is the email we received from customer support

Oh, no! I’m sorry you’re missing the truffle oil – that’s definitely the ingredient that takes that dish from good to extra special, so I apologize that we neglected to include it in your box this week. I’ll be sure to let our production team know about this mistake, so thanks for bringing it to me!

I’m crediting your Home Chef account $15 for that missing oil, and I hope that you’ll still be able to enjoy the tomato soup and grilled cheese meal without it – I ordered it in my box this week as well, and am really looking forward to eating it on one of these chilly nights!

It’s likely we could have found some truffle oil in the basement if we looked a bit harder, but we were pretty hellbent on eating, and the dish turned out delicious without it.

The Swiss and cheddar mix made a nice filling — chewy, gooey, and flavorful.  The soup was great, too.  It was super easy to make and had a really bright tomato flavor.

Chicken Pad Thai With Carrots, Roasted Peanuts, and Cilantro. 35 mins, easy, 752 calories.

This version of pad Thai was very delicious.  It was also very simple to make.  Pad Thai can be a bit tough for the novice cook, as it typically involves lots of knifework and cooking ingredients separately.  This recipe minimized the number of separate preparations — only the chicken and the noodles needed to be cooked separately first.  The sauces added lots of flavor, so we didn’t have to mess around with preparing tons of ginger, lemongrass, extra cilantro, etc.  The flavor was great — very sweet, with a bit of spice.  The fish sauce was more prominent than we expected, but the overall flavor was still wonderful.  The pic above is both servings, plated family style.  It was a big pile of food for two people!  

Steak with Crash Potatoes With Homemade Steak Sauce and Broccolini. 35 mins, intermediate, 690 calories.

This dish came with a nice cut of steak for each person.  The crash potatoes were a great accompaniment, cheesy, crispy, and soft all at the same time — it’s a really easy and tasty preparation for potatoes.  The broccolini was delicious, and it was a nice way to add class to the plate.  The steak sauce was also very tasty — it hit all the necessary flavor notes, with a nice tang and heartiness.    

Lemon-Poppy Seed Pork Tenderloin With Apple-Brussels Sprout Hash and Cider Gastrique. 35 mins, easy, 567 calories.

This dish sounds very fussy, but it was actually quite easy to prepare.  Doing a quick sear on the pork roast cut the oven time down to twenty minutes for us, making this a surprisingly quick meal to prepare.  The lemon poppyseed combo was milder than expected, and it added a nice texture and subtle flavor.  The pork itself was quite tender, and the hash was well balanced, with the sweet apple complementing the slight bitter of the Brussels sprout.  

Blender Required) With Apple, Yogurt, And Honey. 

My kids were skeptical when they first saw the chia seed, but my son then called it the “most delicious thing I’ve ever seen,” once he saw the tub of raspberries.  The raspberry flavor was quite intense.  Despite the generous amount of honey and the apple juice, the drink did not get overly sweet.  It kept a nice, tart aspect to it.  The chia blended well, disappearing texturally into the smoothie.  This was a nice blast of fruit flavor.

Home Chef is particularly known for its accessible ingredient choices, being a bit easier to prepare, and just being more liked by a wider range of palates.  We found this to be true and we also found that it was really delicious, and the amount of food in the box is really substantial. There’s still plenty of adventurous choices to be had with Home Chef too – the menu choices just aren’t quite as out there as Plated sometimes can be. We think the portions are larger with this box than other boxes, and the cost is a skosh lower too.

Visit Home Chef to subscribe or find out more! Get $30 of free food when you sign up – just use this link to get the deal.