Plated is a weekly dinner kit subscription box with high-quality ingredients and chef-created recipes. Each week you’ll choose from a variety of quick gourmet meals that range from meats, chicken, seafood, and purely vegetarian options. You can swap out your recipes and skip any week you don’t want.
Plated ships fresh ingredients and complete instructions right to your door. The food arrives protected within insulating padding made of recycled thread material.
Boxes are always packed with the meat on the bottom with a several big ice packs – the rest of the food is set on top on a cardboard barrier. Gladly, they’ve shifted to putting all of the ice in the lower compartment – this has eliminated the minor damage the tomatoes and leafy greens used to suffer from direct contact with the ice.
Plated sends a weekly email – it doesn’t tell you much about your meals, other than what you need from home. They now offer three-serving meals! This is a great option for guaranteeing leftovers for a tasty and easy lunch!
DEAL: Currently you can get 2 free plates when you buy 4 when you sign up with this link (no coupon code required).
On-card information is streamlined and includes only prep-time, number of servings and calorie count. Most of Plated’s meals serve two people. Unless stated otherwise, our pics of finished dishes show a single serving.
Plated’s recipes rely on mise en place, prepping everything before cooking. This works well, but we always read ahead – you can save time and cutting board space by shifting some steps around, like prepping garnish later while something bakes, instead of at the beginning. The recipes are easy to follow, with ingredients printed in bold and tips to avoid common pitfalls.
All the food comes bagged up and separated (mostly) into the recipes – meat and some large or delicate items are bagged separately.
Seared Steak Quesadillas With Poblano Salsa And Chimichurri. 40-50 minutes, medium, 880 calories per serving.
This dish was a fun hybrid of a simple Cheddar and jack quesadilla and steak with chimichurri sauce. The two dishes melded together perfectly. We started by frying a steak, then built the sliced meat and a drizzle of chimichurri into a baked quesadilla. The steak for this recipe was not trimmed nearly as well as I’ve seen for other steak dishes from Plated, so there was a bit of waste, but the meat itself was tender. Simple sautéed poblanos and tomatoes topped the quesadilla, with the remaining chimichurri served on the side. This meal had great flavor, but the method of incorporating the salsa meant it required a fork to eat. This was easy to make, though cooking, resting, and slicing the steak before assembly made quesadilla prep uncharacteristically lengthy.
Chicken Al Forno With Salsa Verde And Parmesan-Mashed Potatoes. 40-50 minutes, medium, 850 calories per serving.
This dish looked very dramatic, but it didn’t turn out quite as expected. The potatoes were great, loaded with Parmesan cheese. Plated substituted chicken breast for thighs, updating the online recipe cards and sending updated instructions via email. The cooking times were adjusted for the different cut, but that didn’t fully compensate for the difference in the leanness of the meat. As a result, the tomato and breast mixture didn’t produce as much liquid as fat-on thighs would, causing the pan to dry and heavily char the tomatoes (it was a hot, 450 degree oven). The chicken was fine, though perhaps drier than intended, but there was no pan sauce to “pour over” the chicken. The salsa verde was ok – it had lots of big flavor, but I didn’t have a blender to use (and there wasn’t enough of the salsa to effectively use my stick blender, even in a very narrow mug, but I realized this too late to follow the recipe tip and chop everything), so the capers weren’t fully incorporated, and it had too much anchovy paste, even for me. The dish wasn’t hard to make, but the salsa required some fooling — no one wants anchovies in their smoothie blender.
Salmon And Bowtie Pasta With Pink Sauce And Peas. 25-35 minutes, easy, 790 calories per serving.
I served my salmon on top instead of tearing it up, as that was a little too “tuna casserole” for me. I believe the salmon was Sockeye, as it had very dark flesh and a firm texture – it was very good. The pink sauce and pasta was really nice – very creamy and flavorful – and the bowtie cooked very well, not retaining a crunchy bit in the middle, as sometimes happens. The peas were nice way to add some texture and green the dish. This was a very easy dish to prepare.
Plated offers some of our favorite meals, and we love to get dishes we know we love along with some new-to-us meals. This batch of meals seemed to be a celebration of combination dishes, as each was a bit of a hybrid of distinct meals. Overall, the pairings were successful – though I don’t know if they achieved synergy sufficient to rate the combos above their constituent inspirations.
What do you think of Plated?
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