The team at Epicurious has tested 20 different meal delivery services and found that, while most of them make getting dinner on the table easy, serving as a less expensive alternative to takeout, your mileage may vary in terms of the quality of that food. But Blue Apron, one of the original names in meal kits, has a reputation for offering more interesting recipes and better ingredients. We wondered, though, after the company’s 12 years in the business, how accurate that reputation really is. So I tried Blue Apron’s meal kits and ready-made meals for two weeks to feed my family of four. Here’s my honest review.
Blue Apron recipes
Blue Apron offers three different types of meals: Standard meal kits that you prep and cook yourself, Ready to Cook meals that involve little prep and a single provided aluminum baking pan, and Prepared & Ready meals that, while not frozen, resemble the sorts of single serving options you’d find in the freezer section at the grocery store. Each week there are just over a dozen recipes to choose from, and subscription plans allow mixing and matching of the standard kits and Ready to Cook meals (Prepared & Ready meals are available as add-ons or as a wholly separate subscription). Dishes do return to the lineup, but for the four weeks you can plan ahead, you won’t see many, if any, repeats.
Compared to other meal kit delivery services like HelloFresh and Green Chef, Blue Apron offers more variation on the standard templates of its meals. Sometimes the proteins come with two sides instead of one, and you’ll see lettuce wraps, quiche, and noodle soups featured, with different iterations each week. Family-friendly pastas and pizzas, as well as curries, burgers, tacos, sandwiches, salads, bowls, and meat loaves incorporated flavors and ingredients from a wide range of cuisines, making them more interesting than many other meal kits on the market.
What I liked:
Blue Apron’s recipes bring together complex flavors and, more than any other meal kit I’ve tested, produce novel and pleasantly unexpected dishes. Blue Apron also offers more recipes served family-style that can easily feed a family of four. The oven-baked gnocchi with creamy feta, spinach, and roasted red pepper and Romesco tomato sauce was a particularly big hit in my household.
Some weekly menus offer a few sheet-pan dinner options, essentially giving you the Ready to Cook option using your own pan.
Though they are precooked, the Prepared & Ready meals have brighter, more pronounced flavors than they might if they were frozen.
What I didn’t like:
There’s a notable difference between the menus available for two people and the menus available for four, and a lot of the options I would have been excited to try—like Kung Pao tofu, one-pan prosciutto gnocchi, and Dijon chicken with a side dish that combined fluffy rice with vinegar-marinated apple, were only accessible on a two-serving plan—not great for me and my family of four. Also note that, while you can filter your recipe choices somewhat—selecting low carb or vegetarian—Blue Apron won’t necessarily be the best choice if you have very specific dietary preferences or restrictions, just because it will keep you from taking advantage of the wide array of weekly meals on offer.