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 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.
There’s also a $40 gift card included to send to a friend this box!
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.
St. Louis-Style Steak With Mashed Potatoes And Creamy Smoked Gouda Sauce. 35-45 minutes, easy, 756 calories per serving.
Talk about a dish for a meat and potatoes kind of person! This dish was very easy to make, and it is definitely stick-to-your-ribs fare. It could’ve used a simple vegetable accompaniment to cut the richness, but it was certainly delicious and indulgent. The sauce was a quick boil of evaporated milk and Gouda, but it really turned the shallot-filled potatoes and steak into a unified dish.
Maple Cranberry Bone-In Pork Chop With Roasted Root Vegetables. 30-40 minutes, easy, 469 calories per serving.
This dish really captured a harvest season feel, combining hearty vegetables with pork bathed in flavors of the Northeast. The vegetables took a long time to roast, so they were still fairly firm when we plated them. The sauce used a small tub of corn-syrup-based “maple” syrup – I would have preferred a drizzle of actual maple syrup and some sugar or straight corn syrup, as cooking with the table syrup felt weird — tasted good, though. The Pork was superbly tender and flavorful. Easy to make, but time-consuming to get the veggies right.
Spaghetti And Ricotta Meatballs With Pecorino Garlic Bread. 40-50 minutes, easy, 858 calories per serving.
No complaints whatsoever about this classic meal. Simple and very filling, this dish was easy to make and perfect for the whole family. While it is nice to have veggies worked into a meal, it is impossible to deny the great flavor and comforting character of tender meatballs, a mountain of pasta, and crunchy garlic bread. Yum!
Home Chef has such a huge number of options that its easy to pick out meals you know will be great. We like their forays into adventurous new dishes, but we also love their classic dishes — we get their meatballs, lasagna, and simple steak-and-sauce dishes whenever we can!
Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?
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