Home Chef Subscription Box Review + Coupon – October 2016

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.”

Check out all of our reviews of Meal Delivery Services to see every meal kit subscription box option!

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.

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, Home Chef selects meals for you each week. If you’d rather receive different meals, it’s easy to swap them. You can also skip a week whenever you like.

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.

Now, on to the food!

Meal #1- Pumpkin Pancakes & Bacon Brunch

Calories: 969 per serving

Prep Time: 25-35 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

Home Chef has a breakfast option available every week, which is something I don’t often see offered by other meal delivery boxes. I’m not personally a big breakfast eater, but I do sometimes like to make breakfast for dinner. These pumpkin pancakes looked too good to pass up!

First, I laid out the bacon on a baking sheet and baked it in the oven at 375.

While the bacon cooked, I mixed up the pancake batter. I enjoy making pancakes every now and again, but I’ve never made pumpkin pancakes before. Home Chef’s recipe involved combining pumpkin puree and pumpkin spice with dry mix, eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, and water.

The batter was fairly thick, and I had to shiggle (shake/jiggle) the sauté pan every time I dropped in some batter to make sure the pancakes spread out into nice flat circles. I usually prefer my pancake batter to be a bit thinner, but this was workable. When the pancakes were all ready, I plated them with some bacon and topped each stack with butter, walnuts, and maple syrup.

I love how seasonally appropriate this recipe is, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The pumpkin/walnut/spice combination was delicious, and you can’t go wrong with bacon. I’m a maple syrup purist, though, so I have to dock some points for the inclusion of “breakfast syrup” and not real maple syrup. Luckily, I had some of my own on hand.

Meal #2- Rosemary-Cider Chicken with Roasted Apples and Butternut Squash

Calories: 520 per serving

Prep Time: 30-40 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

My next pick for this week’s box was Rosemary-Cider Chicken with Roasted Apples and Butternut Squash— another dish that just screams fall!

The butternut squash came pre-cut, which I appreciate. Cutting up a butternut squash can be really time consuming!

I tossed the squash with apple slices, minced sage, olive oil, salt, and pepper and roasted everything in the oven. While the veggies were cooking, I seared chicken breasts on the stove top and then made a sauce from minced shallots, sherry, apple cider, chicken base, and butter.

When the veggies were done and the chicken was cooked through, I plated the dish.

This meal was fresh and tasty. I liked the mix of roasted squash and apples, and the shallot sauce was delicious. I also appreciate that this dish came together really quickly. The prep time was listed as 3-40 minutes (and the actual cooking time was pretty close to that), but the hands-on cooking time was far less.

Meal #3- Steak Marsala with Parmesan Mash with Sautéed Cremini Mushrooms

Calories: 793 per serving

Prep Time: 35-45 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

My last pick for this box was Steak Marsala. I’m not really a steak-and-potatoes kind of gal, but I do enjoy it every once in awhile, and this recipe was calling my name.

First, I boiled my potato and made the mashed potatoes. (FYI the recipe called for a peeled potato, but I left the skin on.) I mixed the cooked potato together with shallot greens, evaporated milk, and parmesan and whipped them with a fork until they were nice and fluffy. The potato I received in my box was fairly small, and, as a result, I think the ratios for this recipe were just a little off. The parmesan I received seemed like a LOT for the amount of potato. I thought about only adding a portion of the parmesan, but I’m kind of obsessed with cheese, so I just dumped it all in. Why not, right? (Spoiler alert: the mashed potatoes ended up being super cheesy and really yummy.)

Next, I cooked the steak and made the mushroom marsala sauce by combining mushrooms with shallot whites, evaporated milk, and beef drippings.

This was a really tasty, comforting dinner! The potatoes were quite cheesy, but I thought they were perfect. The steak was tender and juicy, and the sauce was rich and creamy. As I mentioned above, it’s not really the kind of meal I make regularly, but it was the perfect meal for a chilly fall evening.

Verdict: Home Chef offers over 10 meal options every week, and I absolutely love their large selection. I greatly enjoyed all of my meals this week, and I love that they all seemed seasonally appropriate. 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. 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?