More Meal Kits We Liked
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Sunbasket ($12-$14 per serving): Sunbasket is a plan that focuses heavily on fresh, organic ingredients, and offers a whole lot of variety and good cooking techniques, including deglazing and attentiveness to saucing. And like Hungryroot, it also offers breakfasts and snacks to supplement meal options with little extras like coconut yogurt and sous-vide egg bites. The meal kit also lets you filter out allergen-containing items. My colleague Louryn Strampe loved the flexibiltiy and add-ons (and even some crickets!) On my most recent test, I enjoyed in particular an excellent Greek chicken and orzo salad dish—and wonder of wonders, the advertised prep time was actually the actual prep time (about 30 minutes). The focus on organic ingredients does makes Sunbasket one of the more expensive meal kit options.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage; Getty Images
Dinnerly ($6 to $9 per serving): Marley Spoon's lower-cost meal kit, Dinnerly was long WIRED's budget pick. Frankly, it's still a good budget pick. It's also a stolidly meat-and-potatoes pick, and often straightforwardly Midwestern in its recipes. The proteins are generous and of excellent quality, and the produce is fresh. The meals are balanced. That said, the recipe development isn't quite up to Marley Spoon standards, though I did love the middle-American trashiness and hold-my-beer inventiveness of a “Reuben meatloaf” stuffed with sauerkraut and caraway seeds. That said, this year I ended up preferring the meals I tried from EveryPlate, which has the further merit of being a buck cheaper a meal.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Tovala ($13 a serving): It's not every day you get to try something that feels so new. Tovala offers perhaps the most ambitious solution to ready-to-heat and prepared meal delivery I've seen: The meal kits come with an oven! In contrast to the sogginess of many prepared meals, Tovala's recipes come in little foil pans with recipes custom-designed for a little steam oven. The results are often delicious, especially a recent sweet chili-glazed salmon with pickled veg and noodles, and the QR code scanning function makes each recipe seamless to cook. Stick with the meal plan for six weeks, and in the bargain you get a quite affordable and powerful little convection oven, toaster, and steamer. Tovala is best as a solution for the solo diner, however: Meals aren't big enough for couples, and servings are one at a time.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gobble ($11 to $13 a serving): Gobble was our prior top pick for fast-cooked meals, in part because its speed-demon meals also offered interesting and worldly flavors. Indeed, our most recent test included Caribbean rondon, Indonesian peanut curry, and steak vierge. But while the flavors have stayed interesting, the focus on fast cooking appears to have waned since my colleague Louryn Strampe tested Gobble—and cook time estimates aren't printed on the recipe cards. I'm still in the process of re-testing this kit, but for now Hungryroot has taken the fast-cooking crown.
Photograph: Louryn Strampe; Getty Images
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