We’ve been eating up a storm this week, so here are our Hello Fresh reviews of four meals we tried!
Recipe boxes like Hello Fresh are a great idea. As a customer, I subscribe to the recipe box via the website. Then, Hello Fresh sends me the ingredients to make gorgeous meals for the family. Everything is measured and neatly packed, with an idiot-proof recipe card to follow.
As most Hello Fresh reviews admit, you pay a little extra for the convenience, but for busy households where you’re short on time and inspiration, what’s not to love? Who doesn’t want to make dinner time easier. If you’re a BA Executive Club member you can also earn a 1,600 Avios bonus for signing up via the Executive Club.
Having tried a couple of recipe boxes this year, I’ve got the advantage of being able to just whether Hello Fresh is good value, good quality and convenient. I also have a fair idea of what I’m looking for when I try a new recipe box. I want fresh ingredients, well packaged, delivered at a convenient time. I want interesting recipes that children will eat. It would also be useful if they don’t involve too much work, and don’t need lots of extra ingredients or equipment.
What do you get in a Hello Fresh recipe box?
HelloFresh invited us to take a two week trial of their Family Box. This means you’ll receive a weekly delivery of two or four meals for four people. The cost is £64 a week for four meals, or £39.95 for two meals.
The deliveries were easy to schedule. The delivery service will leave the box in the garden if you’re not home. You can choose which day you’d like the box to arrive. Ordering the boxes and meals was very quick and easy – just click on the recipes you like to add them to your weekly order.
Everything seems to be well packed, and I thought that the quality of the meat in particular was very impressive. Some of the other products were a bit more patchy – frozen pizza dough arrived defrosted and had to be thrown away, while the onions and ginger were both mouldy in one delivery. I did note that compared to Mindful Chef, for example, there was a lot more plastic packaging.
Hello Fresh Reviews 1:
Beef Ragout with Rigatone and Black Olive Salsa
The first recipe we tried was a beef ragout. I cook bolognese a few times a month, using the same recipe I’ve used for years.
This was a fresh recipe on me, adding yellow peppers and beef stock to a traditional mixture of beef mince, tomato puree, passata, onion and garlic. Everything was cooked in one pot, and ready in around 30 minutes. Preparation was simple and quick.
Genuinely, the recipe was idiot proof and the beef stock added a really different taste, which we enjoyed. It’s also a simple recipe to replicate yourself, once you’ve got the hang of it.
But when it came to the black olive salsa, we wimped out. Flea doesn’t eat tomatoes or olives, so we went traditional with parmesan, and some garlic bread. We’re just basic.
Hello Fresh Reviews 2:
Spicy Sausage Hot Pot with Bulgar Wheat
This warming winter stew from Hello Fresh involves browning sausages in a pan, then slowly cooking them in a sauce of tomatoes, paprika and red onion. Shortly before it’s cooked, stir in a handful of spinach and a tin of kidney beans.
I confess, we cheated again, skipping the kidney beans and spinach. We also skipped the bulgar wheat. I’m sorry HelloFresh, I led my 11-year-old to the wheat, dressed with spring onion and lemon juice, but I couldn’t make her eat, so I boiled some rice instead. Like I said, we’re basic.
It’s interesting though – because often the things that make these meals especially tasty are the sort of ‘adventurous’ ingredients that picky eaters will turn their noses up at. Flea isn’t especially picky but of our three weekly recipes from Hello Fresh, there were probably six things she wouldn’t eat.
This was a really simple recipe, and tasty. The sausages were described as spiced, but I couldn’t detect any spice – if you did want a spicy hot pot, I’d suggest adding in a couple of finely chopped chilies to give more flavour.
HelloFresh Reviews 3:
Cheesy Chicken Taquitos
Of the three recipes we managed to cook for our Hello Fresh reviews, this was probably the one with the highest “faff factor”.
Taquitos are a Mexican street food, as we completely knew and didn’t have to Google. Obvs. You’d almost think we’d never been to Mexico.
Anyway, this recipe is tortilla wraps filled with chicken, onion and spinach along with sour cream and grated cheese. Baked in the oven for 15 minutes, the cheese goes all goeey and delicious, while the tortilla crisps up. They’re delicious.
We cheated obviously by using ready-grated gruyere cheese we already had in the fridge, and I’m not sure our taquitos went all lovely and golden like the ones in the picture, but I’m still calling this one a win. Because Flea ate all of it (once she’d painstakingly picked out every micro-fibre of spinach, obviously).
If I was making this recipe again, I’d probably keep the chicken, onion and cheese but add a tomato-based sauce, which I think would be more palatable to my daughter. But overall, this was our favourite dish of the week.
HelloFresh Final Review: What’s our verdict?
Is HelloFresh worth it?
Much as my inner lazy cook loves recipe boxes, I can’t see myself subscribing to HelloFresh. It’s too expensive considering my daughter won’t eat a significant chunk of the ingredients. But I might use it for a week or two if I knew I had a lot of time off, or if I was expecting guests and needed to impress. Like at Christmas.
Is the food good quality?
I found the meat in my HelloFresh box was great quality but with frozen items and vegetables, my experience was a bit more mixed. My challenge is that if the ingredient you need to make dinner isn’t good, then you’re stuck – the whole point of recipe boxes is saving me hassle. If I have to go to the shops or defrost emergency veggies, that’s not great!
What’s the best thing about HelloFresh?
Here’s the thing: I love nice food and and I love that HelloFresh supplies me with nice food. I love that you get just the right amount of stuff, so you don’t get the waste of buying an entire jar of paprika when you only need a teaspoon worth. I love that the meals are all reasonably healthy, with no weird chemicals or preservatives.
Overall verdict
I loved the recipes for adults, but overall I wasn’t won over by HelloFresh. But the recipes are probably just a bit too fancy for weeknights in our house.
By the time I’ve got home from work, done the school run, rushed out to walk the dog and checked on homework, there’s something very appealing about sticking some chopped veggies and a chicken breast in the oven and coming back 20 minutes later to a cooked meal.
I know. I have HelloFresh shame. That nice smiley man from the adverts is probably frowning as he reads this. Sorry Patrick, I truly am.
Your final comments made me laugh. I love Hello Fresh and I used to get boxes when I had particularly busy weeks at work, simply to take the stress out of thinking about meals, faffing in the kitchen for hours with a crowd of hungry children. The fact everything is dosed for that one meal really makes it quick and simple (although some would moan about the amount of packaging to throw away / recycle). We never had any issues with the dates on the ingredients or the veg going mouldy, but I have to say the food had to be eaten in that 4-day window so only get a delivery if you know you can commit to cooking the 4 meals on 4 consecutive nights. It’s funny you should mention the quality of the meat. I was chatting with a friend tonight over dinner, and we were both saying how good the meat was in the Hello Fresh boxes we’d had (she has hers every single week!).
Haha very honest! I actually quite like the idea of Hello Fresh. Because I do tend to find the time to cook properly, but the thing I hate doing is shopping. So I usually send my husband. Who goes out for a weekly shop and comes home with a tin of beans, two fajita wraps and a toy hovercraft. If someone slightly more sensible could save me the hassle of shopping, that would be appreciated.
Nat.x
Sounds like it would be perfect for you Nat!
Be wary. We were sent a five day box of hello fresh as a present by our daughter in law. We can cook and Are happy to cook. On the positive side the ingredients are high quality, on the negative side the recipes are complex and frankly don’t make sense. I had to pay £9 for the delivery which meant u give them ur bank details. we decided hello box was not for us, so surprise when the following week we were emailed to say it was a subscription service and another box would arrive. I phoned to cancel the service only to be told u need to interrogate their website to cancel. Left a sour note in our mouths .