The Interrobang Recommends: Blue Apron

Published by Interrobang Staff at December 9, 2013

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Eat three nights a week at a top quality restaurant without leaving your house — for under $10 a person. Blue Apron is a delivery service that can make that happen, and we recommend it whether you’re a great cook, or even if you think you can’t cook at all.

Blue Apron– founded by CEO Matt Salzberg — delivers all the ingredients you need. Salzberg comes from a venture capital background, but he heads a team that includes chefs, nutritionists, a food writer and other food and social media specialists who work together to create amazing recipes that are simple to make, but combine ingredients in the style of great chefs to create new tastes. The ingredients are incredibly fresh, and they send exactly the amount you need without waste.

The Blue Apron basics are simple: once a week you get a box containing all the ingredients you need to make three dinners, sent overnight using re-usuable deep freeze icepacks. The recipes have step by step instructions. All you need is some simple kitchen essentials (a pot, a frying pan, a baking sheet). Everything is easy to make– if you can pick up a knife and turn on a stove– you are qualified. You also don’t need a lot of time. They’ve eliminated the need to go to the supermarket, and every recipe takes about 35 minutes to prepare.

Of course none of that matters if the food isn’t great, and the food is really great. The ingredients they send are amazing– you’ll get perfect garlic every time, fresh lemons that are juicy, celery that tastes like celery, not like crunchy water. If you shop for your own produce, you know that its not always easy to get good quality fruits and vegetables. Oh, and all of the meats are from Pat LaFrieda. CEO Matt Salzberg tells us that the produce, and spices are selected from the best suppliers that Blue Apron’s team can find, and because they’re buying in large amounts and only sending you the amount you need, it’s costing you less than shopping in the supermarket. We don’t know exactly where they got the rolls they sent for the The Vietnamese Bahn Mi Sandwich, or the bread for the Meatball Parmesan Sandwich — Blue Apron doesn’t reveal all their sources– but both were better bread than our local bakeries.

They pick the meals, not you. So you have no choice but to be adventurous. Some of you won’t like the sound of this. You’ll think ‘but what if I don’t like something?’ All we can say to that is, we have both adventurous and picky eaters on our team, and out of about 80 meals there were 70 that were unanimously agreed to be amazing, 7 that were okay or had a split jury, and 3 that we wouldn’t make again, but still got eaten. We can’t swear you’ll love it all, but you will definitely love things you thought you would hate. It’s also a lot of fun learning to make Mexican arepas, using rice paper to make Vietnamese spring rolls, cooking a roast cornish game hen, making homemade pickles. Everything can be made again. The portions are probably smaller than you are used to making at home, but we’ve never found ourselves still hungry after finishing. If you really need a big portion you might want to double up your order.

Some of the recipes we’ve especially loved: Meatball Subs with Red Leaf Salad (Pat LaFrieda ground beef, fresh bakery rolls and provolone that we wish we could order by the pound); Five Spice Pork Chops with Plum Sauce, Chinese Broccoli and Purple Sweet Potato (this tasted like something we’d order again and again at a great restaurant), Turkey Chili with Avocado and Cheddar (recipe saved, and already used more than once), Chipotle Steak Salad with Avocado and Toasted Pepitas (we would have sworn that we couldn’t be happy with a salad as a meal) and Chili Dusted Fish Tacos with Pickled Red Cabbage, Mango and Avocado were some of the best meals so far.

There are other services that will send you “meal kits” but none of them appealed to all of our senses in the way that Blue Apron did. If you’re vegetarian, the also offer a meatless version. Sign up and you’ll understand what we’re talking about.

Get more information at blueapron.com