Everyone has been going nuts on the internet over these meal kit delivery services lately, and in some ways I can see why. They're more interesting than eating pasta for the third night in a row, they take the effort out of grocery acquisition and they teach us new cuisines and cooking styles that we might not have otherwise tried. This is why I have been drawn to them, as a foodie and someone who loves to cook, but I realized in one shot that Blue Apron is probably not for me.
Why was I not a fan of this service, when so many other people love it? Well, there are several reasons:
1. Waste, waste and more waste. This is far and away the thing that bugs me the most about these meal boxes. Any of my readers who know me personally know I can be kind of a hippie about these things. Excessive use of K-cups can fill me with a sudden blind rage, and I won't drink bottled water unless I am in a part of the world where drinking the tap water might literally kill me (even then, I might use my steri-pen if it's not chunky or smelly water, so as not to put one more plastic bottle into the landfills). So, there's some bias here. But the waste is definitely an issue, and moreso with Blue Apron than the others I have tried since. There is a box with two or more large ice packs (which are great once, because now you have giant ice packs for your cooler when you go camping, but once you have enough, are simply waste). There are 3-4 or more small one time use bottles with condiments, oils, etc (I saved them to bring salad dressing in my work lunches, but, again, there are only so many tiny bottles a person can use). There are plastic bags or other packaging for all the other ingredients as well. None of the packaging in my Blue Apron box was of a nature intended to save waste. (Others I have used since have been much better at this.) I can justify it once, maybe twice, but I cannot convince myself that this service is a good idea as a once weekly delivery. And there are other reasons...
2. Blue Apron is sooooooo fatty. I've pretty much never eaten anything that greasy at home that was not takeout. All three of the Blue Apron meals I prepared left me thinking to myself, "This is why we're fat." Every recipe contains far more fats than required for what you are preparing. A little plastic container with oil here, a little plastic container with mayo there, a little foil wrapper with butter on top of it all, served with meats that do not even need oil to cook because they make their own. Maybe some people like greasy, 800 calorie dinners, but I am not one of those people. Some meal services offer some variety in this capacity. This one does not.
3. There just isn't that much spice in their "spicy" options. Now that I know they use too much fat, I can just reduce the amount of oil, butter, mayo, etc. that I use from my package (though that is wasteful, it does improve my overall meal experience). However, the trace amount of harissa paste or gochu jang in my package does not help much if I do not have my own harissa paste and gochu jang in my kitchen (I totally do, but I'm using these services to try NEW flavors, not use the ones I already own, and I suspect their other customers are, too). Include larger quantities of the things we are buying this service to try, Blue Apron, not more oil and mayonnaise. Everyone who cooks has oil and mayonnaise!!! Throw enough seasoning in there for people to actually taste it. I am referring to all of the unique flavors, not just the spicy ones. I might not have enjoyed my Moroccan and Korean choices nearly as much if I did not have Moroccan and Korean ingredients already in my pantry, and that is not how this service is supposed to work.
4. The choices are pretty limited. I like that there are six meals and you can choose three. I do not like that they black out which things you can choose together. Other services I have looked at and tried do not do this. When trying to assemble my weekly order, only one time was I able to choose the three things I wanted the most. Did you wonder why I never ordered again, Blue Apron? This was a big factor. I'm not paying $60 a week to only get 1 or 2 of my 3 choices...
5. The final and probably most obvious reason is that I already know how to cook interesting flavors from all over the world that I like, in the way that I like them. Why fix something that isn't broken? I have already been exposed to a lot of these ingredients, seasonings and techniques. For someone who has not, Blue Apron might be an amazing service, and, other than imploring the company to try and find more environmentally friendly packaging and offer a few lower calorie options, I don't have any real complaint about them at all. The vegetables in my Blue Apron box were truly beautiful, and I think they are a good value for ingredient quality.
What it comes down to is that there are three reasons that I cook for myself instead of going to a restaurant: 1.) I like cooking. 2.) Because restaurant food has too much fat and makes me feel icky and 3.) Because it saves money. Blue Apron gives me one out of three in this regard. On the one hand, I love going to their website, reading the week's menu and saying, "Ooooh, I should have harissa chicken with carrots tonight"... On the other hand, when I ordered that menu item from Blue Apron, I was left with a meal that had 300 more calories per serving than if I had made it my way, cost $10 more to make and had significantly more packaging waste than my trip to the store left me with. There was about as much hot sauce in the package of a 1500 calorie meal as I would personally use on one cracker, and as much oil as I would use for a 6 serving casserole.
While I loved preparing the supposedly two (but really three) portion Korean pork bun meal to share with my Korean roommate and his wife, literally none of us enjoyed the fancy mayo that was included in the recipe, and there was barely a trace of spice (even to Min, whose face pours sweat at even a small amount of hot pepper) in the meat or the slaw. Fortunately, having a Korean in the house, there is a perpetual supply of gochu jang paste and cocktail sauce with which to top these items, and the meal was a big success with those additions and subtractions.
In short, if you are looking for the most white person friendly Korean or Moroccan dish you've ever come into contact with, Blue Apron is a one-stop shop. If you like your Korean or Moroccan dishes to taste a little more like Korean or Moroccan dishes, coordinate a trip to your local international farmer's market for sauces and pastes with the delivery time of your Blue Apron Box...
The seared salmon dish was very flavorful, but, again very very greasy.
The recipes I tried are below.
https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/seared-salmon-fall-vegetable-hash-with-apple-brown-butter-dressing
https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/harissa-chicken-carrots-with-dates-crispy-chickpea-rice
https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/roasted-pork-steamed-buns-with-black-garlic-mayonnaise-spicy-cabbage-slaw
These things being said, I think Blue Apron is great for people who have not really cooked much and want to learn about new techniques and ingredients, who are looking to try a flavor they have never tried before, who don't have time to go to the grocery store or just plain don't like going to the grocery store, who can find something to reuse the packaging for so we don't fill 1,000 new landfills with Blue Apron waste alone, who have spare seasonings on hand in case the meals are too bland, who need to bulk up a little for a race training, etc. There are definitely a lot of reasons to like this service and this company, hence the thirty posts per week from my friends about how much they loved this week's Blue Apron selections. I will probably never stop looking at the weekly recipes they email me and using them as suggestions, but this is definitely not something I would ever consider as a weekly service. I wasn't even excited enough about this food to post it on Instagram, y'all.
