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, and seafood, to purely vegetarian options. There’s enough selection to please all palates, and the recipes are seasonally focused. You can choose any lineup of recipes from the available options and skip any week you don’t want.
The food is set atop a cardboard barrier, preventing any frost damage to the more delicate veggies from the ice in the lower compartment .
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Each Plated dish has its own recipe card.
Each 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 often rely on mise en place, prepping everything before cooking. We’ve always been willing to shift steps around when its more efficient, and Plated has also adopted this practice, getting you started on long lead-time items ahead of general prep. The recipes are easy to follow, with ingredients printed in bold and tips to avoid common pitfalls.
All the meats are packed on the bottom of the box, surrounded by plenty of ice.
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.
Everything in the box!
Pesto Chicken Penne With Tomatoes And Shaved Parmesan – 35 minutes, Easy, 820 calories per serving
It’s a delightful Italian pesto pasta dish made from al dente noodles, spinach, tomatoes, and sliced chicken, garnished with fresh basil and shaved Parmesan cheese on top. Splashes of white wine and cream add richness to the pesto sauce, making it a perfect match to the juicy chicken, grape tomatoes, and spinach. It was a nice cross between an Alfredo-style and a lighter pesto sauce, having tons of flavor without going overboard on the heaviness. This dish had lots of flavor complexity, but it came from ingredients that were a cinch to toss in, so it was easy to make.
Tamale Pie With Cornbread Crust – 50 minutes, Easy, 920 calories per serving
This is one of our favorite recurring Plated dishes — it turns out like a Southwestern shepherd’s pie. The filling consists of a beef and black bean chili. We mixed in some Cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese. Its then topped with cheesy cornbread batter, baked, and garnished with a handful of scallion. It takes a little time to put together, due to the prep, assembly, and baking time, but it’s really worth the wait!
Sticky Pineapple Chicken With Scallion Rice And Chinese Broccoli – 35 minutes, 570 calories per serving
This dish was was more work than it appears at first glance. The chicken, broccoli, and rice elements of the dish all required separate preparation, with the chicken then added to the sauce mixture. The hoisin, soy sauce, Sriracha, and juicy pineapple sauce had a bit too intense a hoisin/soy emphasis for our taste — it emphasized the dark and salty nature of the sauce, killing the sweet and sour, pineapple vibe. The greens from the broccoli were also very intense, along the lines of collards. though they would have worked as a great counterpoint in a soup or lighter dish, they were overkill when paired with the already-intense sauce. Plated’s chicken is occasionally overly-firm, with a springy and almost snappy texture. One of our breasts was like this — it’s a “normal” thing for chicken breasts, and we’ve seen it in breasts from various suppliers, but it is still a strike against a dish in our eyes.
Plated is a reliable meal kit service with a good variety of bistro and upscale style dishes. Their forte remains their steak-and-fancy-sauce and pasta dishes, as we’ve found their attempts at Asian flavor profiles tend to be more hit and miss. The ingredients are great quality, and their packaging pas been perfected — we haven’t had any delivery-damage or proper-temperature issues in ages. The instructions are clear and easy to follow, but an inexperience cook can occasionally get into some trouble with the salt-level in dishes, as they incorporate lots of demi glace and thick Asian sauce bases that make additional seasoning unnecessary. Overall, though, they dishes are fairly easy to make, creative, and tasty. Plated is definitely worth trying for anyone interested in meal kits, particularly if you enjoy sophisticated fare.
What meals are you getting this week from Plated?
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