I hear a lot of my friends trying Blue Apron, but then canceling because of the 1) excessive packaging 2) excessive salt/sodium content 3) sudden inspiration to just go to a grocery store and learn more about cooking in general. For those of you on HN who have done BA for more than a year, what are your experiences? How do you balance it with other food sources (groceries, delivery food, going out, other services)?
I just do it once a month. I really wish they would have an option to do that, instead of forcing me to go on the website once a month and cancel everything except one week.
I like it because it's a good way to cook things I might not decide to make otherwise.
Complaint #2 makes no sense to me. You add all your own salt. If they want less salt, add less salt.
One of the recipes I tried listed "Add salt and pepper to taste" after basically every intermediate step, so I could certainly understand why someone might end up with too much salt if they're not paying too much attention or don't know how much salt is typical.
I wouldn't say after each step. It would be foolish to add salt to a sauce I'm reducing for instance. You taste your food always before adding salt. And you generally hold of seasoning until whatever you're doing is reasonably stable.
So imagine I want to cook some chicken breasts. I'm going to dry them and the season them and let them sit for awhile. Then I will cook them and finish them. If I want to make a sauce from the nice remains of the pan they were cooked in I'd remove the chicken and excess oil perhaps and begin that process. And that process has many steps from adding shallots and garlic to deglazing with wine perhaps and reducing that and then adding stock and reducing and then mixing in some butter. The very last thing I'd do is season.
If I'm going to put the sauce on the plate and there is a starch there's a good chance I won't have to season those much at all as the sauce will carry that.
New cooks tend to over season. They forget that if everything you're cooking has salt on it when someone eats one thing there will be salt left on their tongue and in their mouth. This will help the next they thing eat and it won't need as much salt.
In general anything like a stew or a sauce should be seasons as late as possible even if there are many steps in creating it. Meat should be seasoned early and left to rest so excess moisture can be taken out of the surface areas of the meat to help form a better surface texture and flavor.
You might add a little salt in intermediary steps because the sodium will play a role in the cooking process. But those aren't "to taste" and usually you'd only need very little.
I'd probably subscribe if they had a single purchase option. It would be nice to try some of the recipes that use ingredients that I've never tried before. Or as training wheels for my partner on days that I get home too late to cook.
I've been a consistent Blue Apron customer since 2012 getting probably 45 weekly boxes a year. I like it a whole lot. Both my wife and I have busy careers and when it came to dinners were ordering in way too much. Blue Apron is an easy way to get exactly what I need for 3 pretty good dinners a week. I like the variety, I like that they're pretty straight forward to make, and I like that I don't have to think about it. The box just shows up every Tuesday.
I totally get that it's not for everyone but honestly for me it's been a pretty huge life improvement. They have one of my absolute favorite products.
I'm honestly a pretty big fanboy. Happy to chat. Also happy to hand out free weeks to anyone who wants to try it out. Just DM me your email + real name on twitter.
Welcome! It's a good podcast, too - Within the Wires, excellent serial fiction and just well done in general. Gave me more strongly to think, and to feel, than much fiction in the last decade or more has done.
It's really a convenience thing for me. Yeah I could go to the store on my own. But by the time I come up with new/interesting recipes for the week, plan out all of the ingredients I need to buy, then actually go buy them, I've spent a ton of time and really not saved that much money.
My wife and I have been using Blue Apron for about a year now, and we still absolutely love it, we don't see ever cancelling unless something major changes.
We have a small child so restaurants can be challenging, but to us it feels like the time and effort spent preparing and cleaning up are comparable to the whole restaurant ordeal, and only a little bit more intensive than the take-away process. It's more "work" but the shared meal preparation ritual is a time honored tradition that really does feel like it promotes bonding in a positive way.
The main advantage over shopping for ingredients is that we get reasonable variation and good portion sizes without spending any time planning or shopping. We've also learned a number of new techniques for rounding out meals and balancing flavors from the Blue Apron patterns that help when cooking "freestyle."
I would probably even pay a little more (but probably not much) for a more localized version that produced less trash and minimized how far my food traveled to my plate, but it would have to be just as convenient and "everything included" as Blue Apron is.
I've been using BA for a while with my family (wife and son). We love it. We still buy a meal or two for the weekend at the grocery store (or Prime Now), along with the other household staples, but the meal planning is much easier now, and we really like how much less food we end up throwing away (e.g. unused produce). The other "waste" that is non-recyclable is negligible (little squirt packets of liquid), everything else is recyclable--boxes, ice packs, liquid bottles, veggie bags, etc.
The only thing we wish it had is support for dietary restrictions--my wife has celiac's and we have to work around that sometimes.
We occasionally (3x per month?) use BA or gobble (lately more gobble) - there are others we plan on trying soon too. For us, it mostly provides a change of pace and tends to inspire our own cooking. We often add additional ingredients to what they send us. I would agree with the concerns of excessive packaging. While these services save me a trip to the grocery store, I still need to cook it and it always takes me longer than what they say.
