Home Chef July 2016 Review & Coupon

This week’s Home Chef delivered some of my favorite dishes yet!  Home Chef is a meal 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 in concept to other weekly meal delivery services, but it has its own unique features and perspectives.

Meal selections are suggested automatically according to a profile you fill out noting your family’s preferences, but you can change your selections any time. Home Chef offers an incredible 10 selections available for 2, 4, or 6 people, a breakfast choice, a smoothie choice, and a fruit basket selection.  The portions are huge, and this is currently the least expensive and has the most choice out of any similar major subscriptions (for 2 people) – $9.95 per person per selection (they typically have one meal a week that’s a premium meal).

This week, our food was packed within an arrangement of puffy, padded cooler pads.  The food is segregated in bags, and each bag has nearly everything needed to make a complete meal.  You have to have a basic kitchen setup (stove/oven, cookware, etc), but a couple tablespoons of cooking oil and salt and pepper are usually the only ingredients you have to have at home. Unlike other boxes, Home Chef includes liquid egg when needed rather than expecting you to have eggs on hand, and they even included a bottle of oil for shallow-frying.

The box is always packed with a sufficient number of ice packs — the meat is placed in the bottom of box with several of them.  I like that they now put all the meat in giant bag to protect against leakage and to let you get the meat out without fishing around.

The recipe cards display prep time, difficulty,  a “best cooked by” time frame, and even a spice level.  There is also a list of stuff you may need from your own kitchen, like cookware and salt and pepper.

The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures and boldfacing of ingredients.  The recipes are accompanied by pro-tips and explanations of cooking terminology and techniques.  The tips appear in a sidebar so they don’t clutter the actual recipe.

The order of preparation abandons strict adherence to mis-en-place, instead instructing you to start the long lead time items first.  Although this makes the chopping slightly less efficient than doing it all at once, it gets your meal to the table faster, and with everything finishing cooking closer to the same time.  I like it for these reasons, and because it saves me from having a completely overflowing cutting board when I start cooking.  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.  Unless otherwise noted, each of the pictures of prepared food below show one of two servings made by each recipe.  Due to our selections, this box cost us $69.60.  The following pics of prepared food show one of two servings, unless otherwise noted.

 Chorizo Breakfast Burrito With Tostones. 30-40 minutes, intermediate, 907 calories per serving.

The tostones were pretty decent — the cook/squash/cook method worked superbly, but they were limited by the fact that plantains just aren’t too exciting when going up against chorizo.  The burrito, however, was incredible!  We had so much filling, that I had to leave a big pile of it out (it made wonderful leftovers).  The sausage mixture was so flavorful and enthralling that I forgot that there were eggs in the burrito at all — it just seemed like a really delicious chorizo burrito.  The burrito itself was even great — it was crisp, chewy, and delicate all at once.  I would definitely get this again.  It was also very easy to make both the burrito and the tostones.

Hibachi Steak and Smoky Yum Yum Sauce With Teriyaki Vegetables and Jasmine Rice. 30-40 minutes, easy, 832 calories per serving.

This dish was a real hit!  The steak cooked perfectly, which by itself is enough to make any dish a success.  But this dish had a lot else going on too — the roasted veggies had just enough teriyaki to complement their natural sweetness.  The fluffy rice added substance, but the yum yum sauce was really great.  Because we made it ourselves, it didn’t have any of the oiliness you sometimes get with soybean oil based packaged varieties, and it had the perfect combo of creamy and spicy.  Because this dish relied on a no-cook sauce for a blast of flavor, it remained very easy to prepare.  This pic shows both portions of meat and sauce, but I didn’t plate the whole batch of rice or veggies.

Farmhouse Fried Chicken With Mashed Potatoes, Green Onion Gravy, And Corn. 30-40 minutes, expert, 994 calories per serving.

This chicken was superb!  I definitely approve of the breading technique — it only required two steps, and it clung to the chicken very well during cooking.  Plus, it tasted great!  I double dipped the chicken, resulting in wonderful crunchy clumps of breading, similar to what you hope for with a full buttermilk and flour coating.  The cream gravy went well with both the chicken and the mashed potatoes.  The corn was also wonderful.  It was sweet, crisp, and flavorful.   This dish was super satisfying, and it was probably the simplest (successful) fried chicken technique I’ve tried.

Home Chef tends to be the most mainstream of the meal kit subscriptions, featuring dishes that are familiar and comforting.  Home Chef has always had a huge selection of meal options to choose from each week, and it is the undisputed portion king of the meal kit subscriptions!   They have also been adding some more exotic and adventurous offerings to the mix, with Indian, Southeast Asian, and African dishes appearing as choices.  I think they did a great job with these offerings, providing both quality and novelty.  In addition to great dinner options, they also offer breakfast selections and a fruit basket (which we have been very happy with whenever we’ve gotten it).

Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?

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!