I Tried Blue Apron's Prepared Meals and, Well, Hmm...
See if the original meal kit service can replicate its magic with a line of premade, heat and eat meals.
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Blue Apron has prepared meals in addition to meal kits. Here's what I thought of them.
Blue Apron is probably the most familiar name in meal delivery. The brand kicked the category off 10 years ago when it launched the meal kit concept, and even today Blue Apron's meal kits are still pretty great (here's my full review.) Now the company has added a slew of prepared meals to the menu to make mealtime even easier.
Unlike its meal kits, Blue Apron's Heat & Eat meals require no cooking at all -- just, well, heating and eating. While you can't order them outright from the service, you can add a few prepared dishes to your weekly delivery and skip cooking for a night or two. But are these easy, premade recipes even worth adding to your cart?
No. No, they are not.
As a fan of Blue Apron, I decided to try some of the brand's premade offerings. The microwavable meals were quick and easy to prepare as advertised, but overall, not very good. The majority of recipes I tried were oversalted and oversauced, and most paled in comparison to the brand's signature meal kits or other premade meal services I've tested.
How to order Blue Apron's Heat & Eat prepared meals
Blue Apron doesn't offer a standalone prepared meal option through its website, although you can buy a bundle on Amazon, now that Blue Apron is selling its wares on the megaretailer. Instead, you'd likely add a few of the prepared meals to your existing meal plan in place of a meal kit if you're a Blue Apron subscriber.
What are Blue Apron's Heat & Eat prepared meals like?
Blue Apron stocks about seven or eight premade meals per week with recipes representing a range of cuisine types. The meals come fresh, not frozen, though I believe they are shipped frozen and thaw in transit. The food is housed in plastic trays and sealed with wrap. The recipes offered are rather basic with mostly familiar dishes such as soy-miso udon noodles with chicken, Spanish-style beef over rice and chicken stir-fry.
Most of the ingredients listed were natural, with no scary additives or indistinguishable components.
These soy-miso chicken over noodles were too salty, much like all of the others I tried.
The instructions on the back tell you how long to heat each one in the microwave after poking some holes for ventilation. Since I had two of each, I used both the microwave and a nonstick skillet to heat my meals. The skillet proved to be a superior method but still not enough to save these subpar dinners.
The salt, my god, the salt!
I've tested over two dozen meal delivery services, and these were by far the saltiest I can recall. It was the single most prevalent flavor in just about every meal I ate. Some meals, such as Spanish-style beef and rice, have over 1,500 mg of sodium, nearly 70% of the daily recommendation. If you're counting, that's a ton of salt for an average-sized portion of food. About midway through each Blue Apron entree, I could feel the sodium coursing through my body.
Blue Apron's prepared meals were far too salty. The Spanish beef with rice dish alone has over 1,500 mg.
Here's everything I had and how I liked it
- Fusilli with Creamy Mushroom and Truffle: This dish was solid. The pasta was a tad overcooked, but the truffle flavor was balanced and it wasn't oversalted or oversauced.
- Spanish-style beef over rice: Even if I could get past the Atlantic Ocean levels of salt, this meal didn't do much for me. The beef was fine, but the flavors were somewhat muted and oddly sweet.
The Spanish beef with rice was a big miss for me.
- Soy-Miso Chicken with Udon Noodles: Another recipe too salty for my taste. The noodles were a bit mushy and the sauce was too sweet. To be fair, the chicken was mostly tender.
- Indian Chicken Korma over Rice: This one was also palatable, with less total sodium than the others (950 mg) but still too much. The sauce was tasty, but the chicken itself was just OK with some tough pieces among the tender ones.
The coconut chicken korma was one of the better dishes I tried.
The final verdict
If you haven't gathered this by now, Blue Apron's prepared meals didn't do it for me. I found the bulk of them to be overly salty with mushy vegetables and syrupy sauces. The fusilli with truffle and mushrooms was the only bright spot of the bunch, but most of the others did nothing to impress.
If you're thinking of signing up for Blue Apron, I won't stop you since the meal kits are quality and the prices, fair. But I'd warn against adding any Heat & Eat prepared meals to your delivery each week, even if they seem like a welcome respite from cooking. I say save your meal plan credits for the kits and call in for some good local takeout. Or try one of the prepared meal delivery services I did like.
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