Home Chef is a meal in a box subscription – every week, you choose from a variety of recipes and have all the ingredients and preparation instructions delivered to your door. The basic concept is the same as other weekly meal delivery services, but it has its own unique features and recipes.
Home Chef has a huge selection of meal options to choose from each week, including some Asian, Indian, African, and South American inspired dishes among their more traditional American home-style and steakhouse fare, and the portions are the most generous among the meal kit subscriptions we review regularly!
In addition to the many great dinner options (available in 2, 4, 0r 6 servings), they also offer breakfast selections, smoothies, and a fruit basket (which we have been very happy with whenever we’ve gotten it).
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).
DEAL: Get $30 of free food when you sign up – just use this link to get the deal!
The food is packed in puffy, padded cooler pads, with each meal packed in a separate bag containing nearly everything needed to make a complete meal. The box is always packed with several ice packs.
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 such as cookware and salt and pepper. You have to have a basic kitchen set-up (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 – the even include liquid egg (instead of expecting you to have eggs on hand), and oil for shallow-frying when a recipe calls for more than a few tablespoons worth.
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. I love that they include a heads-up for when ingredients are divided and used in different parts of the dish.
The prep is done is a sensible order, with long lead time items first. This helps everything finish cooking close to the same time. The recipe cards have pre-punched holes so you can store them in a recipe binder – we usually prefer to just wait till the recipe is offered again instead of attempting to gather the ingredients to recreate it ourselves.
Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag, except for a few larger items. Unless otherwise noted, each of the pictures of prepared food below shows one of two servings made by each recipe.
Seasonal Fruit Selection With Clementines, Navel Orange, Fuji Apples, And Bosc Pears. 166 calories per serving. Great quality fruit – it’s always very firm and juicy – ripe enough to eat but also able to handle a week in the fridge without going soft.
Coconut Curry Lentils With Wild Rice. 35-45 minutes, easy, 550 calories per serving.
We expected an Indian style dish, but this one definitely had a Southeast Asian flair. The red curry had lots of lemon grass, ginger, and red chili, but it also had a fair dose of fish sauce – this was a little outside the flavor profile we anticipated. It was packed with flavor, made a nice non-meat option, and the texture was great. It was also super simple to throw together.
Turkey Chili With Cheddar Cheese. 25-35 minutes, easy, 938 calories per serving.
We were very excited to have a simple, hearty chili. The recipe was exceedingly simple, as it lacked any peppers. The restrained seasoning and limited ingredients made for a mild and very bright chili. It was tasty, but I would’ve loved a bit more seasoning and some peppers to throw in. It was a Midwest style chili, with kidney beans added for texture, and I will issue no demerits based solely on it not adhering to Texas or Colorado definitions of the dish.
Bacon Chilaquiles With Salsa Verde And Cheddar Cheese. 60+ minutes, easy, 625 calories per serving.
Loved this dish! We’ve done chilaquiles with a meal kit before, with mixed results. This version remedied the issue we previously had preparing the tortilla chips (they burned easily when baked) by frying them in bacon fat! The mound of scrambled eggs added an extra dose of protein and lightened the texture a bit. The green tomatillo was superb, as was the pile of crisp bacon. Because everything was prepared separately then combined, this meal took a bit of work, but it was well worth the effort!
Caramelized Shallot & Sun-Dried Tomato Spaghetti With Sweet Peas And Cream. 25-35 minutes, easy, 979 calories per serving.
This dish was tasty and very rich. Also very easy to make. I would’ve loved a little bit of bacon with this, just for a little protein and crunch.
Blade Steak With Dried Tomato-Oregano Butter With Smoky Creamed Corn And Pan-Roasted Potatoes. 40-50 minutes, easy, 972 calories per serving.
This dish was well-rounded – the steak was a a cut that cooks up fairly solid, so it was an appropriate choice for pairing with a compound butter. The potatoes were good, and the corn had wonderful, cheesy flavor. It had a bit of chew to it, simply because it was frozen, not fresh off the cob. This was an easy dish to prepare.
Classic French Green Peppercorn Pork Tenderloin With Mashed Carrots And Roasted Asparagus. 25-35 minutes, intermediate, 625 calories per serving.
This dish had a very classic feel to it, with buttery carrot mash adding an element of homecooking. The green peppercorn sauce could make anything taste good, but the pork started out very tender an tasty – the asparagus was in great shape and not woody at all, either.
This was an enjoyable batch of meals, with the breakfast chilaquiles being a true standout dish. Home Chef is very reliable, always offering a good selection of fun, adventurous options (like our lovely chilaquiles), and tried and true safe bets (like steak)!
Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?
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