My colleague Molly Higgins, who is vegan, simultaneously tested out her own very different goals and preferences on Hungryroot. These involved no chicken at all.
Ostensibly, when you sign up, a Hungryroot dinner will cost you $13 a serving, while lunch costs $12 and breakfast is a mere $4.50. But in practice, the number of meals you choose translates to a weekly supply of “points” whose sum may be different for each dish. And so while one dinner plate is 11 points, another might be 12. Snacks might cost just a couple points apiece. And if you don’t use all your points this week, next week is for ribeye.
Easy, Breezy, Chicken-Caesary
In any case, when I told Hungryroot’s questionnaire that I wanted my meal kit to help me save time, the algorithm listened. Among five recipes and some prepackaged breakfast items, only one meal took more than 15 minutes to prepare.
Most plates were as much assembly as actual cooking. One lunchtime meal’s only prep involved slicing sous vide chicken breast atop a Caesar salad mix. An avocado chicken rice bowl mostly involved composing a few ingredients, after a few minutes heating a rice pouch and pan-searing some precooked “chile limon” chicken breast. Add to this a pleasant Southwestern-style black bean and corn salad, plus a squirt of avocado crema, and voilà: a casual West Hollywood lunch.
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Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The only dish that took significantly longer to cook than to eat was a pair of stuffed red bell peppers—which featured a better-than-expected enchilada sauce, courtesy of new-school Mexican-American brand Saucy Lips. Here, too, the chicken came pulled, precooked, and preseasoned, and the rice again arrived in pouch form. My own cooking mostly involved heating peppers in a toaster oven, barely more effort than heating frozen lasagna.
Indeed, my week of Hungryroot sometimes felt less like cooking than a week spent grazing in the prepared food section of an upscale grocery store, or one of the nicer fast-casual food courts—the kind that has Sweetgreen and Baja Fresh instead of Wendy’s and Chipotle.
Custom Concern
That said, among my recipes, ease of cooking came at the expense of fresh produce. My box contained just two red bell peppers and an orange. When I mentioned this to my vegan co-tester, Molly, her response was quizzical. She didn’t have this problem at all. Her meals were full of veggies. My own survey responses had accidentally convinced Hungryroot’s algorithm that I’d rather not cook.
“All of the meals had fresh produce, took half an hour or less, most were under 500 calories, and those that weren’t were high protein (plant-based protein, of course),” Molly wrote. Some meals mixed vegan proteins and vegetable sides. Others included veggie-filled stir frys and a plant-based taco plate made with chipotle-spiced, charred cauliflower. While I was gently warming a premixed black bean salad, Molly was out there charring brussels sprouts.