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 choose any lineup of recipes from the available options 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. Putting all of the ice in the lower compartment prevents frost damage to the more delicate veggies.
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 small families, pooled cooking among roommates, or just 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.
Patty Melts With Baked Sweet Potato Fries. 35-45 minutes, easy, 880 calories per serving.
This meal is designed to have a side of sweet potato fries. For whatever reason, they sent two sweet potatoes wholly unsuited for use as fries due to both small size and odd shape. The pat of butter is just for size comparison. While fine for cubing in a dish, they didn’t work for this meal. Plated credited us for the meal, and I subbed in some sweet potatoes from the store. Plated has always been good about making up for occasional glitches in ingredients.
This was a really delicious patty melt! It had lots of Cheddar, and the meat retained a nice, juicy texture even having been worked a little to incorporate the herbs. I loved the bread, too – the rye had great flavor, balanced the meat and cheese well, and the large breadth made a good platform for containing all of the melty cheese. Very easy to prepare, as well.
Mediterranean Chicken With Corn, Zucchini, And Tzatziki Sauce. 40-50 minutes, medium, 740 calories per serving.
This dish didn’t work out well for us. The chicken and naan were superb, and I liked the grated-cucumber approach to the Tzatziki, but our veggie jumble was gritty. I had rinsed the veggies, but some fine silt or other dirt was embedded in the skin of the zucchini, adding an undesirable crunch. It was also a little overboard on the lemon — we find that we have to use common sense and adjust the citrus levels downward on some recipes. Prep was easy, and the dish would have been really nice if not for the grit. Plated also credited us for some of this meal.
Turkey And Black Bean Enchiladas With Monterey Jack And Sour Cream. 35-45 minutes, easy, 800 calories per serving.
This dish had nice flavor, but the turkey cooked up really dry. Our beans, which were shipped repackaged from a can to a bag, had turned bad in the three days it took to get to this meal, so we had to substitute our own black beans. Given the dryness of the filling, this dish could have benefited from having a Cheese sauce or other sauce over the top during baking in place of just shredded cheese. Relatively easy to make, and baking in the provided tin pan is really useful for minimizing clean up.
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 week was definitely an off week, as each recipe had a major flaw in the provided ingredients (quantity, dirt, spoilage). We generally like Plated’s meals and find them to be elegant and flavorful, but this set missed the mark.
What do you think of Plated?
Comments
Plated just got bought out by Albertsons and much later on the meal kits will go on retail shelves.