Saffron Fix May 2016 Subscription Box Review

Saffron Fix is a meal and dinner kit subscription service that will satisfy your Indian food craving each month. The subscription costs $48.00 per month for 2 meals or $60 for 3, and you can choose vegetarian or non-veg, and you’ll receive fresh pre-chopped ingredients and hard-to-find spices to prepare a delicious home-cooked Indian meal. Every month they’ll send you an email for meal selection.  Note that this box delivers only to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware at the present time.

Saffron Fix currently delivers to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware.  The limited geography ensures limited time in transit, which means fresher ingredients.  Hopefully they will add additional locations from which they ship, so everyone can enjoy it as much as we did!

Everything arrived packed in a heavy-duty disposal freezer bag.  It had a familiar reflective and bubble composition, but it was thicker than that used by other meal kit subscriptions.

The food was separated by recipe, with a single ice pack in the middle.  I would like to see them change it up a bit here — direct contact with the ice can speed deterioration of vegetables, and the meat was mixed in with everything else.  Everything was cool, but not cold enough that I would feel good waiting very long to unpack the box.  I’d love to see an extra couple ice packs, piece of cardboard to prevent direct contact of veggies with ice,  and separation of the meat from the other ingredients, practices that have, after some experimentation, become standard among the other meal kits.

The recipe cards note the cooking time, calories, and number of servings, and it separately lists those ingredients included in the kit and those items you need to supply (e.g. salt, butter, saucepan, etc).  Because the dishes prepared are likely to be relatively unfamiliar to the cook, the color photograph is really handy for getting a sense of the desired appearance and consistency of the prepared dish.  Also useful, given the somewhat exotic nature of Indian cuisine, is a short description of the dish, including notes on any unusual ingredients or techniques, as well as a guide to adjusting the heat level of the dish.

The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures.  The instructions are very clear and easy to follow — I think the sentence construction is more natural than that sometimes employed in other subscription boxes.

Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag.  One of the large bags failed upon removal, and some 0f our chopped tomatoes snuck out of their bag, but everything was in great condition — meat packages were sealed tightly, our pav (rolls) wasn’t crushed at all, and no spices popped open.  Everything was surprisingly fresh for being pre-chopped.  All of the following pictures of completed dishes show one of two servings.

Chicken Kheema Pav. 30 minutes, 300 calories per burger.

This dish takes kheema, a chopped meat dish, and serves it in the manner of Delhi street vendors, on a buttery roll known as pav.  We absolutely loved the flavor and texture of this meal!  The spices were sublime, with a moderate level of spice (tame by Indian standards) and a buttery, sumptuous flavor and enticing aroma.  The dish is a bit like larb or cooked kitfu, but it had a more complex seasoning than the latter and more tender texture than the former.  The rolls were also insanely delicious when warmed in a drizzle of butter.  The dish may look like sloppy joes, but it tastes divine!  It was also very easy to make — it’s a one-pot meal, and the ingredients come pre-chopped.

Matar Paneer. 30 minutes, 400 calories per serving.

This dish is a Punjabi version of Paneer that uses a rich tomato sauce to embrace the cubes of cheese instead of the familiar creamed spinach accompaniment seen in the popular saag paneer.  I liked this version very much — the sauce is more flavorful, and the peas still provide a bit of vegetable matter.  The cheese was pre-seared, so the hardest part of the preparation was already done (fresh cheese, like tofu, can be difficult to crust without destroying).  This was the easiest main dish to prepare, as it was pretty much a matter of warming the combined ingredients.  Rice and naan accompanied the dish, and it was very satisfying for vegetarian fare.  The naan was very tasty and was a whole wheat style naan.

Chicken Bhuna. 30 minutes, 300 calories per serving.

The most complex of the three dishes, the bhuna combined multiple layers of fragrant spices and used some exotic elements like rose water and cashew paste to create a lovely texture, taste, and aroma.  The chicken arrived pre-chopped and marinating in yogurt and ginger.  The ingredients were pre-measured and cut to size, so the preparation involved little effort other than getting the order of ingredients right.  The dish was incredibly delicious, and the use of fried onions and ground cashews really created a solid base of flavor — this meal tasted like something that would have to be simmered all afternoon.  The yogurt broke a bit when it hit the heat of the pan, but it melded back into the sauce as it cooked.  It was served with rice and whole wheat naan.

We were very impressed with the quality of the ingredients.  The pic above shows a few of the ingredients for the bhuna.  I loved that there was outer bark on our cinnamon, and the cardamom was whole.  Just look at the amount of saffron they gave us!  The saffron was twice what I’ve received from a spice subscription where saffron was a featured spice!  All the vegetable items were pre-chopped, and the chicken for the bhuna was even pre-marinated.  We couldn’t be happier with the taste and ease of preparation — this subscription definitely exceeded expectations, and we highly recommend it for anyone at all fond of Indian food or who wants to mix up their menu a bit.

It’s worth pointing out very specifically that this box currently only ships once per month. We cooked our meals over 3 days but you could sign up for 2 and cook them all together. This box was really delicious and we hope you’re in their shipping zone! We wish more subscriptions would provide pre-prepared ingredients, because these meals were so easy to pull off!

Visit Saffron Fix to subscribe or find out more!