Home Chef is a subscription meal delivery service that sends a weekly box of “perfectly portioned, premium ingredients, spices & sauces, and easy, step-by-step recipes.”
Boxes contain “fresh ingredients” and “chef-designed, restaurant-quality” recipes.
Check out all of our reviews of Meal Delivery Services to see every meal kit subscription box option!
You can skip a week whenever you like.
My Subscription Addiction pays for this subscription. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)
The Subscription Box: Home Chef
The Cost: Meals start at $9.95 per serving, and delivery is free for orders over $40.
COUPON: Get $30 off your first box from Home Chef. No coupon required, just use this link.
The Products: Fresh ingredients and chef-designed recipes— everything you need to make restaurant-quality meals at home.
Ships to: 60% of the US and expanding. (You can check to see if Home Chef delivers to your zip code here.)
Check out the Food Subscription Box Directory and make sure to add Home Chef to your subscription list or wishlist!
When you first sign up for Home Chef, you take a short quiz about your meal preferences and dietary restrictions.
Based on this quiz, the Home Chef algorithm selects meals for you each week. If you’d rather receive different meals, it’s easy to swap them for something else.
I found the website very user-friendly, and I was thrilled with the meal options. Home Chef had 10 dinner options available, 1 breakfast, a smoothie, and a fruit basket!
When my box shipped, I received an email with tracking information. The week I ordered, Home Chef had a couple of special menu items for Pi Day, which I took full advantage of. Pi day is celebrated on 3/14 (because Pi= 3.14…), and is a great excuse to eat pie!
Since this was my first box, Home Chef included a binder to help store and organize my recipes.
This is such a great extra! I love re-using my meal box recipe cards, so this will definitely come in handy!
Meal #1- “Bahn Mi” Meatball Sub
Calories: 728 per serving
Prep Time: 25 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
When my Home Chef Box arrived, I was hungry and craving a sandwich, so I set to work on making Meatball Bahn Mi Sandwiches!
Bahn Mi sandwiches are the product of French influence on Vietnamese cuisine. The sandwiches combine crusty French bread with traditional Vietnamese ingredients (like cilantro and pickled veggies). There are some excellent Bahn Mi restaurants near where I live, so the bar for these sandwiches was set pretty high!
All of the ingredients for each recipe came bundled together in a plastic bag.
I began by quick pickling cucumber, carrot, and a pepper in vinegar. Home Chef sent a small vial of vinegar, but it wasn’t enough to submerge my veggies, so I added some extra vinegar from my cabinet.
Next, I made the meatballs my combining ground pork, ginger paste, Worcestershire sauce, and half of the included spice blend. I shaped them and pan fried them in a little olive oil.
While I waited for them to brown, I mixed together mayonnaise with the remaining spices and toasted the buns.
When everything was ready, I strained the pickles and assembled the sandwiches.
These were a big hit! The meatballs were extremely flavorful, and I loved the heaping pile of pickled veggies. I would make these again in a heartbeat!
Meal #2- One Pan Classic Chicken Pot Pie
Calories: 757 per serving
Prep Time: 55 minutes
Difficulty: Intermediate
This is the first Pi Day special I ordered!
Before I got started cooking, I cleaned and chopped the veggies and inventoried my ingredients.
I sautéed carrot, onion, and celery in a pan with butter and Home Chef’s seasoning blend.
When the veggies softened, I added a mix of cornstarch, water, and chicken base, followed by chopped chicken. I stirred this mix and waited for the cornstarch to thicken the gravy.
While waiting, I made the dough for the top of the pot pie from flour, salt, olive oil, and Greek yogurt. Now, I have to be honest: this recipe had me a little worried. Greek yogurt in pot pie dough? I’ve never heard of such a thing! Still, I pressed on.
I rolled out the dough and placed it on top of the sauté pan. I brushed the surface with melted butter, topped it with a pinch of seasoning, and transferred the pan to the oven.
The recipe instructed to cook until the crust turned brown, approximately 15-18 minutes. After 25 minutes, my crust was still pretty pasty, so I turned off the oven and ignited the broiler. This helped brown the crust.
Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this dish. The flavors were great and oh so comforting, but there were a couple of small things I’d change if I made this dish again. First of all, the gravy was a little thick for my liking. I usually thicken soups and gravies with flour, and I find corn starch can sometimes produce a gelatinous texture, which I find a little unpleasant. This is, of course, a matter of personal preference, so I can’t hold it against Home Chef. The second issue I had was with the crust. My FAVORITE thing about chicken pot pie is the crust, and I usually use all butter pie crust or puff pastry. The Greek yogurt crust from Home Chef had a nice tanginess, but I wish it had been richer and flakier. (Of course, this would have been much harder to create at home and would have added a hefty number of calories.)
Meal #2- Chicago-Style Veggie Deep Dish Pizza
Calories: 844 per serving
Prep Time: 50 minutes
Difficulty: Expert
Home Chef is based out of Chicago, so it makes sense that one of their “pi” offerings was a deep dish pizza. I’ve never made deep dish pizza at home before, so I had to give it a try!
I laid out all of the components for the dish and cleaned and prepared the veggies.
To begin, I wilted spinach in a pot with roasted red pepper.
While the spinach cooked, I made the pizza dough. Interestingly, this dough recipe was very similar to the one for the chicken pot pie. To make it, I combined self-raising flour, olive oil, Greek Yogurt, and salt and kneaded it for about 5 minutes.
I then rolled it out and transferred it to the provided deep-dish pie pan.
To construct the pie, I layered ricotta, mozzarella, and veggies in the crust.
As a deep dish pie is made backwards, the sauce went on top. (Interestingly, instead of a can of sauce, Home Chef included a can of diced tomatoes. I’m not sure if deep dish pizza is traditionally topped with tomatoes or sauce, but I thought it was interesting.)
The pizza baked at 375 for about 35 minutes.
When it came out of the oven, I topped it with parmesan, red pepper flakes, and dried oregano.
This ended up being a fairly big hit! The bready crust got a little soggy, but it didn’t stop us from devouring the pie. I should also mention that this pizza was huge. My husband and I are both pretty big eaters, and this easily fed us for two meals.
Verdict: This is my first time trying Home Chef, and I’m pretty impressed! I found the ordering process easy and straightforward, and I love the large selection of meals Home Chef has available each week. The ingredients for my meals arrived in good condition, and I found the recipe cards very easy to follow. (Though, inexperienced home cooks should pay close attention to the posted difficulty levels. The intermediate and expert recipes included techniques that beginners might struggle with.) The quality of the food itself was pretty high, though I wouldn’t describe all of the meals as “restaurant quality.” The Meatball Bahn Mis, however, were outstanding. In terms of value, Home Chef is very competitively priced in the meal box subscription market. Their meals start at $9.95 per serving, which is cheaper than Plated ($12 per serving) and on par with Blue Apron ($9.99 per serving) and Hello Fresh ($9.90 per serving).
Have you tried Home Chef?
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