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.
You can skip a week whenever you like.
Check out all of our reviews of Meal Delivery Services to see every meal kit subscription box option!
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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: 90% of the US. (You can check to see if Home Chef delivers to your zip code here.)
Check out all of our Home Chef reviews and find other meal boxes in the Meal Subscription Box Directory!
Keep Track of Your Subscriptions: Add this box 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.
I think the Home Chef website is very user-friendly, and I like how many meal options they offer. Most weeks, Home Chef offers 10 dinner options, a breakfast, a smoothie, and a fruit basket!
When my box shipped, I received an email with tracking information.
This month, my box contained a welcome booklet. I’m not sure why I received it in this box (I’ve been a subscriber for months now), but it provided some cooking tips and tricks.
Unfortunately, there was an issue with one of my ingredients again this week. When I collected my box from the entryway of my condo building, I picked it up and noticed a small puddle underneath. The box itself was a little soggy, and when I unpacked it I discovered that one of my salmon filets hadn’t been properly sealed and had leaked into the box. The other items in the box were unharmed, but it wasn’t very nice having to clean fish juice off of everything. (Ick!)
I reached out to customer service about this problem, and they issued me a credit for both servings of the salmon dish. Home Chef customer service is excellent, and I’ve always been pleased with the way they’ve handled issues. That being said, it’s a little worrying that I’d had to reach out to them so frequently. This is the second box in a row that I’ve had an issue with. (My last box contained wilted herbs.)
Meal #1- Cedar Roasted Salmon with Root Vegetable Slaw
Calories: 600 per serving
Prep Time: 25-35 minutes
Difficulty: Intermediate
Since I was down a salmon filet, I decided to make this dish for lunch and just split the remaining piece of fish between two plates.
I began by chopping an apple and a beet into matchsticks. I really enjoy chopping veggies (it’s one of those activities that borders on meditation for me), so I had a lot of fun doing the prep for this meal. I also minced a couple cloves of garlic and zested a lemon.
To help infuse the flavor of cedar into the salmon, the recipe instructed for the fish to be wrapped in cedar sheets before being roasted in the oven. Since the cedar sheets are so thin, it’s important to soften them in water first so they don’t snap.
They softened pretty quickly, and I wrapped my salmon filet and secured the sheet in place with butcher’s twine. I’ve never cooked salmon like this before, and I had a lot of fun wrapping the filet!
I roasted the salmon at 450 degrees, and while I waited for it to cook I prepared the salad by tossing the apple and beet matchsticks with carrots, arugula, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, lemon zest, salt, and pepper.
When the salmon was ready, I unwrapped it from the cedar sheet, placed it on top of the salad, and sprinkled pistachios on top.
This was a delicious salad! The salmon had a really nice cedar flavor, and the sweet and tangy slaw was perfect.
Meal #2- Pulled BBQ Chicken Sliders with Salt and Vinegar Chips and Cole Slaw
Calories: 982 per serving
Prep Time: 30-40 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
This dish was a special offering for the 4th of July!
My wonderful husband (the resident grill master), wanted to try his hand at making this dish, and I was happy to oblige!
He began by slicing potatoes and baking them on a sheet tray. While the potatoes roasted, he rubbed chicken thighs with BBQ seasoning and cooked them in a pan over medium heat.
When the potatoes were halfway done cooking, he removed them from the oven, flipped them over, and added the partly-cooked chicken to the tray. Everything then went back into the oven to finish cooking.
While they baked, he made the coleslaw.
Then, when the chicken and potatoes were ready, he finished the potatoes with a drizzle of vinegar, pulled the chicken and mixed it with BBQ sauce, and then plated the sliders.
These sliders were really tasty! I love pulled chicken, and Home Chef’s version was tender and flavorful. The potatoes were great (I love fries with vinegar!), and the coleslaw was good, too. This certainly wasn’t a low calorie dish (982 per serving is one of the highest per-serving calorie counts I’ve ever seen in a subscription meal box), but it was festive and fun.
Meal #3- Italian Sausage & Peppers Rigatoni
Calories: 939 per serving
Prep Time: 30-40 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
The last meal I selected for this box was Italian Sausage & Peppers Rigatoni.
I began by cleaning my veggies and slicing peppers and onion.
Next, I cooked the Italian sausages in a hot pan.
It may seem a little silly, but one of the main reasons I selected this dish is because of the garlic bread! Home Chef has an unusual garlic bread recipe (I had it once or twice before in previous boxes), and I really like it! Their topping recipe is a combination of olive oil, garlic, and parmesan, and I love how it makes the bread rich and cheesy.
After the sausages were done, I boiled the pasta and began cooking the onions and peppers with garlic and red pepper flakes.
I sliced the sausage and tossed it into the pan.
Next, I added marinara sauce and a little water, brought everything to a boil, and added the cooked rigatoni. I divided the pasta between two plates, topped each serving with parmesan cheese and added some garlic bread on the side.
This dish was tasty and incredibly indulgent. There was a LOT of sausage in this dish (too much for me, personally), and I thought the portion was huge. I had plenty of leftovers, which is probably a good thing since this dish was another calorie bomb. At 939 per serving, I was glad that I didn’t want to eat it all in one sitting!
Verdict: Home Chef offers over 10 meal options every week, and I absolutely love their large selection. I had no problem choosing three meals that sounded great this week, and, overall, I’m happy with the meals I received. Since Home Chef offers so many different meals each week, I don’t want to generalize too much about their offerings; however, I will say that I’ve come to expect comfort food from Home Chef. Looking at the meals I received this week, two of the dishes were a little calorific for my liking, but they were certainly tasty! (And I can’t really complain about high calorie dishes when I’m the one that picked them. There were other, lower calorie options available.) It’s disappointing that my box arrived damaged (again), but I’m pleased with the way customer service handled the problem. Hopefully, I won’t have further problems with wilted or leaky ingredients in the next box! 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).
Do you subscribe to Home Chef? Which dishes did you pick last week?
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