Oli
Oli
Resident eejit. Radio4, kitchen dancing, owning recipe books to read not follow
May 3, 2021 4 min read

What a few months of HelloFresh has taught me

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I wrote this before HelloFresh had some sort of meltdown leading to missing boxes, poor communications and ultimately us canceling our subscription. It was helpful for a while though.

For the last couple of months we’ve been getting four meals a week delivered by HelloFresh (affiliate link, we both get £20 off). We’re both reasonable and proficient cooks, with 100+ recipe book and every ingredient you can imagine available with 24 hours notice, but with life being pretty bloody stressful right now, not thinking about what to cook is a blessing. We’ve also signed up in the past to get us out of a food rut and it worked brilliantly for that too. We’ll cancel it eventually I imagine, it’s not a service I can see myself living on, but it’s very useful.

HelloFresh meals are designed to be easily cooked by folks who maybe don’t cook much, with no special equipment, an oven, a grill, a couple of pans and a decent knife is generally all you need, in less than 45 minutes; with many meals being less than 30 minutes. If you cook enough of them you start to notice a few things which are handy outside of the world of boxed meals.

Not that it’s not without it’s problems, the amount of plastic waste annoys me and if one more person says “you could just have a whole jar of spice X and be done with it” they’re going to get a slap. I love that HelloFresh might help get a load more people cooking who otherwise might not have.

Add cream, creme fraiche or coconut milk

The combination of richness, fat and creaminess turns a pan full of juices into a chicken pie filling, or a rich curry sauce. Where most cooks would add a little flour and some butter, stir furiously and then reduce on a low heat for ages, whisking in any of the above, though especially creme fraiche gives a great finish to sauces.

Stock powder in everything

Adding a teaspoon of stock powder, generally vegetable or chicken, adds depth and richness to the flavours already there. It also brings a tonne f salt, so go canny later on.

A tin of tomatoes is almost always too much

When I open a 400g tin of tomatoes I nearly always end up adding them all, because it seems like a waste. Most HelloFresh recipes use cartons of 200g.

Eggs not required

I’ve never seen a HelloFresh recipe that involves an egg, because they don’t ship well. One place where I would have missed them is as a dip before breadcrumbing things (more on this later) but HelloFresh almost always uses cornflour and water as a replacement. This leads to a really nice texture and sometimes this wash has extra flavours added to it, for example soy and powdered ginger in last night’s Katsu Chicken.

Panko crumbs are ace

Breadcrumbing things has never worked out well for me and I partly blame that on never having stale bread to make into breadcrumbs (why would you - just have an extra slice of toast and don’t risk wasting it). Panko crumbs are however, brilliant. You can also get them in huge bags cheaply from your local Asian supermarket.

The “dice, grease, bake and top” combo

Lots of the HelloFresh recipes rely a small collection of techniques and Dice, Grease, Bake and Top (my words not theirs) is one of them. Stick the oven on 200, dice things into a reasonably small size, anoint them with oil and seasoning, roast for 20 minutes or so and then pile stuff on the top. You see it a lot with sweet potato, white potato, onions and peppers. Yes, it’s just oven roasting, but it’s a great way to get crispy bits and some caramelised flavours.

Toppings make all the difference

HelloFresh finishes every meal well and it not only looks nice but the extras on top add crunch, extra flavours, some colour. Toasted almonds, green herbs, yogurt, chopped herbs, pomegranate, nuts and seeds, there’s no rocket science but it really bumps most dishes up from “nothing special” to “surprisingly fancy feeling”

You need far less meat than you think

A little bit like the whole tin of tomatoes, the portions of meal in HelloFresh often feel a little small when I’m cooking them, but that’s because I’m used to oversized portions. Beef mice for example comes in 500g packs and so generally I’d be making 500g of spag bol. In reality, we only need 250g between the two of us.