Lately, I’ve been trying various meal kit companies to get
my dinner cooking mojo back. I’ve used Chefs Plate many times in the past and
then I stopped. A recent 40% off promotion they sent me to encourage me to “come
back” was enticing and allowed me to try their service again.
Meal Choices and Pricing
While Chefs Plate seemed to be the industry leader when I
first did my roundup in 2016, it’s current crop of competitors are more professionally
run and have great menu offerings. Chefs Plate presents 19 options each week, but
I found it was difficult to find three things I wanted most of the time. To be
fair, it’s because I’m a flexitarian and during the week I don’t eat meat.
While they offer about four vegetarian menus each week, which is a good
percentage from the 19, they never sound overly exciting.
Still, I appreciate Chefs Plate’s simple and affordable pricing
where most choices are the standard $10 per serving (assuming 3 meals per week
for 2 people) or $60 a box. There are a few “15-minute meal” selections that
are an extra $2.99 a serving, which offers pre-chopped ingredients but are
still not a 15-minute affair. Out of all the delivery companies, Chefs Plate is
one of the most affordable and they don’t skimp on portions as well.
Customer Service and Ordering
The website is very easy to navigate and skipping weeks is a
breeze. With recipes posted for the next five weeks, organizing meals for the
month is easy and they even make it painless to permanently deactivate a plan with
a click of the button instead of having to call in.
For my area in Toronto, they provide delivery five days
during the week (every day except Friday and Saturday), which is about one day less than competitors. I guess it makes sense as most people typically don’t
order the kits for the weekend as much.
Ease of Cooking
Most recipes require at least two tools and many increase to
three like the roasted veggie and ricotta pasta bake. Pasta bake… you would
think this would be a quick and easy meal – boil pasta and use pot for sauce,
then transfer into a baking dish – yet the recipe calls for four items: a large
pot for boiling pasta, a smaller pot for making the sauce, a sheet pan for
roasting the vegetables, and then the baking dish for ultimately combining all
the items and finishing it in the oven. If you don’t like dishes, skip the
pasta bake.
Not everything is so tool intensive. The Turkish beef kofta
over herbed tabbouleh was quick and easy where you add a spice mixture to the
beef, roll them into ovals, and bake on a sheet pan. Another pan is used for
the peppers, which really wasn’t necessary as they could be lined around the
kofta, so you can always look for opportunities to cut down on washing. While
everything was in the oven, to finish off the recipe I made tabbouleh, a
simple process of boiling bulgur wheat and combining with herbs, vegetables,
and seasoning.
To keep things cool during the summer months, they’re the
only company that removes the dairy products from the paper bags and keeps them
with the meat by the ice packs. If the kits are sitting out on the doorstep
this is a great option to keep things fresh longer, but does mean that the
ingredients aren’t part of the main bundle so when you’re grabbing things out
of the fridge to prepare the meal it takes more time to ensure you have everything.
The Taste Test
While the recipe names don’t sound the most exciting, Chefs
Plate’s meals turned out delicious.
The Turkish beef kofta was packed with lovely Mediterranean
flavours and the meat ball (already seasoned) was enhanced further with a
garlic mayo. Even the tabbouleh gets a facelift above the traditional
parsley mixture by also incorporating feta and roasted peppers, creating a
salad that you could even eat on its own.
It’s surprisingly easy to make the curried turkey & biriyani-style
rice, combining everything for such an amazing depth of flavour. Already there’s
the spiced chicken and rice, but add stir fried aromatics, a curry sauce, and
herbed raita and the rice bowl was fantastic.
Even their pasta dishes aren’t boring. The roasted veggie
& ricotta pasta bake doesn’t sound overly stimulating but once the
mushroom, sweet peppers, and plethora of cheese get mixed together it became a
dish that had us going back for seconds. I also thoroughly enjoyed the Mexican
street corn linguine, which combines pasta, fresh corn kernels and cheese in a poblano
pepper sauce that is absolutely delicious. These were a couple of the
vegetarian dishes that were a huge hit.
Environmental Factors
It was nice to see that the bag used for the main package
was still made from paper, but individual ingredients still create a lot of
waste. I’d like to see them start to move towards more fulsome pasta sauces –
instead of sending tomato paste, tomato sauce base, and crushed tomatoes – so that
things arrive in one package instead of three to cut down on waste.
What I liked most was their ice packs: it’s simply water and
not that weird gel that is gross and difficult to dispose. Why companies use
the weird gel is beyond me, the water ice packs work just fine.
Conclusion
There’s a reason Chefs Plate has been able to survive for so long when the other meal kit companies I reviewed in 2016 have since been shuttered. They’re not flashy with pictures and don’t have elaborate sounding dishes, but when you do settle on three items the recipes are surprisingly delicious.
