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. The recipe cards tell you anything you need from home – usually just cookware, salt and pepper, and some olive oil – occasionally you’ll need an egg.
Prosciutto Pizza With Basil And Balsamic Vinegar. 30 to 40 minutes, easy, 830 calories per serving.
I like that this recipe comes with a dough ball – you get the benefit of a conditioned dough and fresh-baked crust without the extra steps required to create it from scratch – it speeds up the preparation considerably. Pictured is the entire recipe – it made a cookie sheet sized pizza big enough for two (I think the pan size is technically a “half sheet,” but it is the large cookie sheet used in home kitchens).
The pizza was really delicious – great crust and enough cheese to create the desired flavor and texture without taking over. The greens were a great balance to the slight gaminess of the prosciutto and the sweetness of the balsamic.
Moroccan Chicken With Cherry Tomato Sauce And Couscous. 30 to 40 minutes, medium, 860 calories per serving.
This dish was very easy to make, and it captured the preserved fruit, caramelized aromatics, and fresh parsley notes I’d expect in a Moroccan dish. The light couscous was a great counterpoint to the richness of the skin-on chicken and the jammy sauce.
Coconut-Poached Chicken With Jasmine Rice And Crispy Shallots. 30 to 40 minutes, medium, 600 calories per serving.
This dish had some of the best signature flavors of the Thai peninsula, without requiring any fussing with grating ginger or peeling lemongrass. It had the feel of a poke bowl, and a nice balance of creamy richness, spice, and tender rice. As with any “salad” type dish standing as a meal, it took a bit of prep before final assembly, but it was certainly worth the effort.
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 set of meals had three very different offerings – from two sides of the Mediterranean and from the Far East, and each blew us away. This was definitely one of the better meal flights, and the flavors were awesome!
What do you think of Plated?
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