Hello Fresh is a weekly meal kit subscription box with complete recipes and high-quality ingredients to make your own fresh, healthy, gourmet meals at home.
They offer three different subscription options — Classic (choose 3, 4, or 5 meals for 2 people or 3 meals for 4 people from 6 weekly options), Vegetarian (receive 3 HF-selected meals for 2 or 4 people), and Family (receive 3 HF-selected meals for 2 kids and 2 adults). You can always pause the subscription to skip a week if you need to – this is super handy for vacations!
Each Hello Fresh recipe has its own lovely card with a picture of the plated dish, prep time and total time to table, calorie count, and a visual inventory of the included ingredients.
DEAL: Currently, you can save $40 off your first box with coupon code 7UT7K8.
The instructions are easy to follow, regardless of your skill level. Usually you start by washing and prepping all the ingredients before cooking. Within the detailed, step-by-step instructions, ingredients are set in bold type for ease of recognition. Info panes in the sidebar list anything you’ll need from home (pans, cooking oil, etc), as well as the quantity of each provided ingredient needed for 2 and 4 person versions of the recipe.
The ingredients for each meal are packed in separate bags within a padded, insulated cooler bag. Several ice packs keep everything cold, with the individual paper bags protecting the ingredients from touching the ice directly.
The box also comes with a complete nutrition information for each recipe you could have selected for the week (the sheet is two-sided), including a list of all ingredients and their country of origin.
There’s also a Fresh Life fold-out mini-magazine included in this box.
This issue of the magazine features grill-friendly tips for your summer barbecue party!
It includes a short article lamenting the only conceivable downside of living in the expensive and crowded paradise that is New York City – the difficulty of throwing a barbecue!
The centerfold is a preview of some of the July offerings that let you “grill your way through NYC” with Hello Fresh.
A card was included, suggesting a colorful red, white, and blue skewer for the Fourth.
It’s nice to see a note from Hello Fresh giving a heads up about the possible delivery delay during the Holiday week.
The brown bags used by Hello Fresh keep all the ingredients for the recipes together. Everything but the largest vegetables is separately packaged within the bags. Condiments and canned goods are provided in high-end, commercial packaging, and Hello Fresh usually provides pre-measured spices and other packaged ingredients in their own branded packaging.
Chicken Under A “Brick” With Baby Broccoli, Lemon, And Fingerling Potatoes. 55 minutes, level 2, 750 calories per serving.
This dish uses the weight of a pot full of water to press down on your chicken while it cooks, creating a wonderfully crispy skin. Fresh rosemary and lemon are the perfect accents for roast chicken, and the baby broccoli and roast potatoes give the dish a real French country cooking feel. Our two person meal came with a large leg with thigh meat to split. Pictured is the whole, 2-serving recipe. This meal was easy to make – aside from the simple “brick” trick, the oven did all the work!
Southwestern Stuffed Peppers With Beef, Quinoa, And Monterey Jack Cheese. 30 minutes, level 1, 641 calories per serving.
I can see why this dish is an all-star of the Hello Fresh repertoire – its really delicious and is able to deliver the classic flavor you’d expect in this dish, but with an upgrade in texture and a boost in protein from the quinoa. It is a little bit of work for being a relatively simple dish – the quinoa and peppers need to be precooked before assembly and final baking. We thought it was certainly worth the effort!
Pork Luau Burgers With Pineapple Relish And Green Salad. 35 minutes, level 1, 720 calories per serving.
This burger was very tasty. It was simply seasoned and serve on a nice bun, but the caramelized pineapple and onion relish added the sweetness and complexity needed to make the dish a standout. The greens were nice to have for some fiber and balance, but they were a bit of an afterthought and didn’t jive with the theme of the burger. The choice of pork for the protein was perfect with the relish.
We enjoyed this set of meals. We’re finding Hello Fresh to have slightly simpler ingredient lists and procedures than some of the other meal kits we review, which makes it get to the table a little quicker and requires less brainpower to put together – a big advantage when you are hungry and pressed for time. The quality of the produce has been, as the name Hello Fresh suggests, very good.
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