Tried and tasted: best restaurant DIY meal kits

Mindful Chef

The benefit of home-delivered recipe boxes such as Mindful Chef is obvious for time-poor families or working people who want to make dinner from scratch but just don’t have the mental energy to dream up a new meal every night. They are also a godsend for those who don’t have much experience in the kitchen.

But for people who think of themselves as fairly imaginative chefs, the whole thing can seem a bit mysterious. Why would you want pre-portioned ingredients when you could buy more from the supermarket for less? Why would you pay to have a sachet of oregano sent to you when you could buy a whole jar in the supermarket? Only through having tried out Mindful Chef does the benefit become obvious. Namely that even if you are a confident cook, recipe boxes such as these can push you outside your comfort zone and get you to try something new.

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Eagle-eyed readers might spot something about these recipes - the near total absence of carbs. This is the main USP of Mindful Chef recipes, which all aim to help you reduce your intake of sugar and refined carbs. The result is healthy, veg-filled food that is still incredibly tasty. Plus each box will help expand your culinary horizons no matter how experienced a chef you are. A genuine double win.

The Rockfish team controls the entire process from boat to plate, minimising the time between when the fish is caught to the moment it’s delivered. The freshly landed fish is then cleaned, portioned and sustainably packaged in specially designed boxes directly next to the quay in Brixham (travelling just 17 metres in total). The fish and seafood on offer changes daily depending on availability, but options can include dover sole, smoked haddock, brill, scallops, sea bass and crab.

The eye-catching seafood box comes with a helpful guide created by Tonks and his chefs containing recipe ideas, information about the cuts and tips for cooking the perfect piece of fish. Rockfish pairing sauces are also available, with flavours including lime pickle butter, kedgeree butter and anchoiade, as well as beautifully packaged tins of tuna, sardines, mussels, mackerel and cuttlefish made using fresh seafood from the south coast of England.

Health and convenience are the twin guiding principles of Balance Box, a comprehensive meal service which delivers breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks per day. You can choose between a lighter plan, with meals adding up to 1,200 calories per day, or an 1,800-calorie “market plan”. Everything comes ready prepared: cold meals - smoked salmon and tomato ceviche salad, for example - can be eaten straight from the pot, while hot meals just need a couple of minutes in the microwave. It’s all fresh, seasonal and ethically sourced - and very tasty.

Wagyu beef - the marbled, fat-rich meat from a select few species of Japanese cow - has been a staple of luxury steakhouses for many years now, but is still a relative novelty for the home delivery market. The Worstead Estate in Norfolk, which delivers blast-frozen meat nationwide, raises full-blood and wagyu-cross cows to the exacting welfare standards expected by the guardians of the lineage. The result is tender, deeply flavoured fillets and fantastically juicy burgers, as well as a full range of steaks and joints.

Sitting somewhere in between a restaurant-at-home service and a recipe box, The Cookaway provides one-off deliveries with all the ingredients and instructions for a premium meal for either two or four people. You choose from an extensive menu that draws inspiration from several national cuisines - examples include soy and ginger chicken with soba noodles or spicy linguine with smoked haddock. The next day, everything will arrive in a chilled box, ready for your attention.

Unlike most box services, Cookaway includes extra virgin olive oils and premium vinegars with its recipes - the kind of touches that will raise your meal to the next level. Recipes are easy to follow and easily replicated if you want to buy the ingredients yourself. Prices are at the more expensive end of the scale, but as a non-subscription service it’s perfect as an occasional treat - or a way to broaden your home-cooking repertoire.

Although its deliveries are limited to the western half of London, Provenance’s catchment area is ambitious for a self-styled “village butcher”. Demand surged during the first lockdown and beyond, as cooking “has become even more of a form of entertainment and an avenue for creativity as well as a necessity”, according to Tom Gibson and Struan Robertson, the co-owners. In the past few months they’ve built up their online business “to serve people who can’t get out to physical shops or don’t have a great butcher in their local area”.

You can order a la carte from an extensive range of fresh and cured meats, or opt for one of the pre-selected boxes. The Provenance BBQ Box, for example, comes with a spread that would grace the most ambitious socially distanced barbecue: a 500g T-bone steak, two ribeyes, two Iberico pork chops, a whole deboned chicken, two lamb kebabs, four burgers, ten sausages and a bottle of barbecue sauce. Just add fire.

Every meal is thoughtfully conceived, and easy to cook, with barely any multi-tasking of pots and pans, or the like. It’s easy to repeat meals on your own too: none of the ingredients are pre-mixed, so you’ll know exactly which ones to buy the next time you’re at the supermarket. The only real drawback is that ingredients don’t come pre-arranged, so if you order a four-recipe box, you’ll have to sort through four jumbled sets of ingredients.

Abel & Cole is a recipe box company with a conscience: the ingredients - all organic and seasonal - arrive mostly unpackaged, in a single cardboard box that can be returned when your next one arrives. The meals themselves are swift and straightforward to make, as well as tasty to eat. It’s easy to find what you want on the menu, too, thanks to sections catering to vegans, vegetarians and people looking for simple or low-calorie meals. Since the recipes all use easy-to-find ingredients, if you want to repeat them but source them yourself, you’ll have no trouble at all.

If you’re set on doing as little prep as is possible without ordering a takeaway, take a look at HelloFresh. There’s not even any measuring involved: all the ingredients arrive in precise amounts, right down to the chopped garlic - and instructions are clear to the point of being idiot-proof. Recipes cater for most dietary requirements (though not vegans) - as well as those looking for especially speedy meals, although these take 20 minutes rather than Gousto’s ten.

Grubby, the UK’s first 100% plant-based recipe kit, features simple yet creative meals like sweetcorn fritters with mango salsa and pan-fried gem lettuce, and Italian pesto bulgar wheat with courgette, aubergine and fava beans. Unlike some other recipe boxes, this one arrives in 100% recyclable packaging which, in 95% of cases, is produced in the UK. All London deliveries are made on bike and any food waste is offset via Grubby’s partners, further reducing the company’s environmental impact.

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