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.
While Home Chef excels at hearty traditional homestyle favorites, they have also done a great job with a growing catalog of more exotic offerings, incorporating Asian, South American, and African flavors. In addition to great dinner options, 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 meat is packed with ice packs in a giant bag to protect against leaks.
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 is packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag, with meat and larger items left separately. Unless otherwise noted, each of the pictures of prepared food below shows one of two servings made by each recipe.
Korean BBQ Steak With Rice, Grilled Pepper, And Zucchini. 35-45 minutes, easy, 916 calories per serving.
I haven’t refilled the propane on my grill yet, so I cooked the meat and veggies in a cast iron pan. The sauce for this dish had a great balance of sweet, umami, and spicy. The meat was great – very flavorful and tender. The texture of the vegetables was perfect (tender but firm), and the rice was great for wiping up all the sauce! This dish was easy to prepare, but pretty tough on the cooking pan, because the sauce caramelized in to a solid char.
Bacon Flatbread Pizza With Honey Caramelized Onions, Grape Tomatoes, And Goat Cheese. 30-40 minutes, easy, 762 calories per serving.
Yum! I absolutely adore the way the flatbread cooks up in the oven. It gets a perfectly golden crispness and buttery flavor. The toppings were a good combo, with smoky bacon, creamy, tart goat cheese, and sweet grape tomatoes. The caramelized onions made the dish feel really indulgent. I had to cook the bacon and onions before topping the pizza, but there is nothing difficult about this dish.
Vietnamese Ground Pork Skewers With Ginger Slaw. 30-40 minutes, intermediate, 710 calories per serving.
I liked the creative slaw as an accompaniment. It was very spicy, and the vinegar and cucumber made a refreshing palate cleanser from the nice greasiness of the meat. The crunchy cabbage added a perfect texture complement to the skewers, as well. This dish was easy to make, because the meat for the skewers had just the right moisture content – it molded well and held well enough to be rotated for cooking on all sides.
Friendsgiving Side Trio With Apple Herb Stuffing, Pecorino-Garlic Mashed Potatoes, And Cranberry-Almond Green Beans. 50-60 minutes, intermediate, 694 calories per serving.
Every part of this meal was delicious. The meatballs were pretty dense, but they had a fun stuffing-flavored seasoning (sage and poultry seasoning, I think) to complete the Thanksgiving flavor profile. The cheddar potatoes and almond green beans were just perfect, and of course, there was gravy. It came with a good deal of chunky cranberry sauce. The number of elements in this dish meant it took a little work to make, but nothing complicated. Big hit with the kids too!
Home Chef has a huge selection of meal options to choose from each week, and the portions are always generous – when we prepare a two-person meal, we usually get a lunch portion of leftovers, or we can split mild dishes with our three kids (ages 2, 6, and 8) and feed everyone!
Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?
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