Home Meal Reviews: Week 4 - Blue Apron

I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving. As a new migrant from the UK, this holiday is a new concept to me but I enjoyed it immensely. The idea of a roast dinner with mashed potatoes instead of roasted is novel and awesome... but back to food delivery and this week I look at the big shot in the arena - Blue Apron:

Meals:

Meal 1 - Thursday: Fish Ramen

It looks good but the fish was basically raw and the whole thing
was overpowered by the taste of fish.

Meal 2 - Saturday: Chicken Meatballs & Celeriac Mash

A bad picture of a delicious meal. I could even tolerate the kale
and Celeriac is a new favourite.

Meal 3 - Wednesday: Chili Rubbed Steak, Kimchi & Rice

Rotten Basil, no scallions, the kimchi was poor but the rice was good.

Convenience

Ok before we even get to the food delivery, lets start with the website. This is possibly the least helpful website I have ever encountered (and I am including broken websites that return 404 errors). The site will always take you through the same 'registration' steps regardless of whether you are new or returning. It will also take any excuse to deprive you of any discounts or vouchers you have applied. I ended up going through the whole process four times before I could get a discount to stick right the way through to payment. One prior attempt I had been assured of a discount at every step... until I got to the payment page where it was inexplicably the full price. In all honesty if it hadn't been for the sake of this review I would have given up after a couple of failed attempts and just told everyone I knew to avoid them like the plague. And I am not even going to get started with the cancellation process - to complete that you need to be the procedural equivalent of American Ninja Warrior. The food for all previous services had been bundled by meal. Blue Apron did some of this but some ingredients were loose and this lead to an issue with all the scallions being used in a single recipe instead of being split across two as was intended.

Preparation

These meals come with a similar level of preparation requirement to HelloFresh, about 45min and a lot of chopping practice! However the recipe cards are just as poorly laid out as Hello Fresh with no clear indication of when things should run alongside other things etc occasionally leaving some components of your meal cold.

Ingredients

The basil for the third meal had wilted before I got to it, as had some of the scallions, but everything else was good and the steak in particular was clearly excellent quality.

Taste

The meals were very hit and miss. Some components were delicious, some (like the 'quickkimchi') really weren't.

Conclusion

I really can't recommend this in any way, it is beyond me how anyone has opted for this over HelloFresh.

Next week: PeachDish all the way from... Atlanta apparently...