green chef (owned by HelloFresh) is a great meal kit subscription for beginners. I said it in our Meal Kit Buying Guide. The recipe cards are filled with helpful images and the intuitively grouped instructions don’t skip important steps. I spent weeks testing meal kit subscriptions during my tenure at WIRED, but we’re testing them again to bring you individual reviews. Green Chef has received an honorable mention in our guide since I first tried it and I still think it’s a good option for anyone looking to improve their cooking skills.
Green Chef has a few plans available. You can get three meals with two servings per meal (which equals $13.49 per serving), or you can go up to four meals with six servings per meal (which equals $11.99 per serving). Different dietary and lifestyle filter options include plant-based, low-calorie, high-protein, keto, and gluten-free (among others). Note that Green Chef’s price is higher than similar style meal kits, because almost all of the ingredients are organic.
There are usually introductory offers to make the first few weeks cheaper. Each week you will select your dishes from the weekly menu and make any customizations, such as swapping proteins or adding extra servings. You can pause or cancel your subscription at any time as long as you do so at least five days before your order ships. Most of the packaging is made from recycled materials and It is recyclable in itself..
An emotional roller coaster
During my week of testing Green Chef, I experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows. My Steak and Shrimp with Creamy Truffle Sauce It was a brown, over-salted mess, partly due to my heavy-handedness with the Maldon flakes and (I think) partly to the instructions that told me to salt my dish six different times. To put it in context, there was no particular type of salt to use; at most meal kit services you provide your own so I just used the flaked sea salt with which I always seasoned. He was so absorbed in following each step meticulously that I didn’t stop to think, “Hmmm. I have already salted and seasoned it four times.” Instead, with reckless abandon, I enthusiastically seasoned it and, in the end, cried, threw it away, and unfortunately washed the chicken nuggets at 10:30 p.m. And for what it’s worth, even outside of the salty sauce, it didn’t I loved the accompaniment of green beans and tomato. I didn’t love the ratio of shrimp to fillet. I just didn’t love this dish!
Photography: Louryn Strampe
On the other hand, my Chicken with Maple-Dijon Sauce It was delicious. Possibly one of my favorite dishes I have ever prepared. The chard, sweet potato and apple hash could have been a meal in itself, and the maple-glazed chicken was divine. I realized that it reminded me of my favorite Sweetgreen dish (the harvest bowl), and after tasting the finished dish enough to be able to review it, I deviated from the recipe and added a piece of goat cheese to further emulate the Harvest Bowl. It was perfect. So good that I didn’t want to share it. I liked this dish so much that I saved the recipe card.
And I had a similar experience with the third course.Buttery Lemon-Garlic Shrimp. The star of the meal was the sun-dried tomatoes soaked in a mixture of lemon juice and vegetable broth. They were bright and spicy, a real delight that brightened up the otherwise heavy shrimp pasta. I’ve cooked with lemon juice, sun-dried tomatoes, and vegetable broth individually hundreds of times. Why did it never occur to me to combine them before?
Overall, I found the time estimates for the recipes to be a little short. I think all recipe kits have this flaw. If you are Ina Garten or one of the wonderful Enjoy Food editors, maybe you get the timing right. But for the average person, it’s safe to give yourself a 20-minute buffer in addition to the estimated prep time shown on the recipe card.