Home Meal Reviews: Week 2 - HelloFresh

Entering into week two, Hello Fresh is a similar service to Gobble with 'quick to make' foods from good ingredients.

Meal 1 - Tuesday: Pork Medallions

I just couldn't stop the sour cream being lumpy...

Meal 2 - Wednesday: Chicken Meatballs & Gnocchi

It didn't look like the picture, but still tasted pretty good.

Meal 3 - Thursday: Steak Bibimbap

I don't like lentils and I still loved this.

Convenience

Unlike Gobble, HelloFresh is able to deliver Monday evening, giving you, three meals for two to use through the week. I was very impressed with the presentation of the ingredients with each meal in a nice box. Having the service deliver on Monday was a lot more convenient for us and meant I didn't end up needing an additional day of take out fattening me up.

Preparation

I don't think I really lauded Gobble's virtues in this area nearly enough. HelloFresh is basically giving you exactly what you would get from shopping in a store, just in the correct measures. This means there will be plenty of chopping, slicing, grating, peeling and more to be done. This partly explains the increased time in getting the food ready - these meals take 30+ minutes rather than the mere 10 minutes offered by Gobble. You are going to need a Pot and a Pan and a chopping board and probably some bowls handy for putting things to one side etc etc for each recipe giving you a ton of extra washing up along the way.

Ingredients

Oh how I miss the days when my biggest complaint was the packaging! HelloFresh is much more limited in what it is providing. I was having to add in sugar and eggs. The ingredients were not poor quality but the fact they aren't already prepped caused a few issues. The carrots in the Bibimbap recipe, for example, were very dry from the storage making peeling them a total nightmare.

Taste

As with Gobble, it was all pretty tasty but the way that HelloFresh tends to use lots of little bits and doesn't give the tight timing structure leaving parts of the meals cold when they really shouldn't be. I am not sure I can identify whether this is a result of my inability, lack of clarity in the instructions or poor decision making in the meal design.

Conclusion

If you are wanting to really learn to cook, then there are some merits to this service. Gobble has some 'secret sauce' components you couldn't reproduce, that is certainly not true of HelloFresh! This is a real case of you are cooking and learning to do everything. The downsides of this are the time factor and the real risk of screwing something up and ruining the meal. I think that this could be solved with better, clearer instructions for each meal, but without this I can't really recommend this one.