My daughter kindly bought me two weeks worth of food from the company Green Chef and last night I finally had a chance to cook up my first meal: Baked Lemon Pepper Tilapia with Feta. It was fun to prepare, and the results were quite delicious and plenty for two people. But there are trade-offs with this popular form of food prep that I wanted to explore, along with sharing more information about the experience itself.
To set the scene, I’m a decent chef in my own right, having cooked many family meals over the years. I might lean on prepared sauces, but I can assemble a dozen ingredients with the best of them, producing tasty meals from the stove, oven, or BBQ. I endlessly experiment with a couple of favorite dishes too, notably fried rice (an amazingly all-purpose meal) and salads (there’s precious little that doesn’t taste good in a salad). I can also follow a recipe and am ready to explore the best that the Internet has to offer in specific areas.
Nonetheless, I have been intrigued by ingredients-by-mail food prep companies for quite a few years. I certainly don’t mind trading some of my time in return for a fresh, healthy meal. Many companies in this space have meals that are already prepared too – like Factor – where it’s just a fresher version of frozen food from the supermarket. A buddy has those and reports they are literally pop-in-the-microwave easy and quite delicious. Me? I appreciate convenience but am leery of ingredients and food quality. Hence my curiosity about Green Chef.
BASIC PREP FOR A MEAL
The challenge that these companies face is food stability during distribution. A local butcher or fishmonger gets nice fresh meat, but how do you keep it cold and safe when it’s being split into a single serving box, mailed to the customer, then possibly sitting on their front porch or in the mail room for a few hours before it returns to a cold storage setting?
The Green Chef solution is quite intriguing, a large box with recyclable insulation, along with (ostensibly) recyclable frozen ice bags. Each meal comes in a lunch-size brown paper bag and the protein is in its own storage bag to ensure it’s sandwiched between the cool bags. Open up a bag and the ingredients are all sealed in individual plastic bags. Here are all the ingredients for the tilapia dish:
You can see that the recipe card is big, bright, and features an appealing photo. The front lists ingredients and nutrition information, while the back has step-by-step directions. The ingredients include peas, almonds, kale, feta cheese, bulgar, lemon pepper, and a few sauces, along with the most important ingredient, the tilapia.
A trick to cooking is to work on parallel prep, so that the slow item is cooking while you get the faster items ready to go. The goal is to have everything done at the same time. This is anticipated with the cooking process, so the first step is to combine the bulgar (a wheat grain), umami flavoring sauce and water in a pot to cook…
This requires very little attention, just noticing when it’s boiling, then letting it simmer for about 15 minutes. Once it’s cooked it can safely sit in the saucepan for as long as needed.
TIME TO CUT THE KALE
While there wasn’t much prep required, the kale did require being stripped from its unpalatable stem (easiest is to just tear it with your hands) and chopping up…
The almonds needed to be chopped up “roughly” (as the recipe details) which I almost just used my coffee grinder to accomplish but instead just did an appropriately rough job with my knife. This prep won’t be used until later, so probably could be done while the fish is cooking, but it’s better to do as much prep as possible!
The part that was most interesting was the tilapia preparation. The fish was shipped in a tight, thick plastic bag that was inside the brown paper wrapper (see above pic) and was clean and had no smell when removed. I rinsed it, as I always do with fish, then placed it on a lightly oiled piece of foil. The toppings were the lemon-basil caper sauce (in the transparent plastic bag) and feta cheese. Not super appetizing uncooked:
I put that in the oven, which meant that I had 10 minutes to complete all of the other tasks so that I could eat as soon as it came out of the oven. Fortunately, there’s not much left. I put the now-cooked bulgur into a bowl then cooked up the kale in the same saucepan, along with about a tablespoon of olive oil. Once cooked, I added the peas and the bulgur. After a good stir, I split it across two plates, then placed the steaming hot tilapia on top:
There are a lot of flavors in this meal, but the result was quite delicious and the above is but one of the two plates of food produced with this recipe. I quite enjoyed the fruit of my labor and would rate it as one of the best fish meals I’ve had in many months.
All good, and a fun and tasty experience. But…
THE GREEN PART OF SHIPPING AND DISTRIBUTION
What really startled me was the ratio of packaging to foodstuff. The four meals the company sent me would all fit easily into a standard children’s backpack, but the shipping box was hefty:
All of the packaging shown is recyclable, but I can’t help wonder what percentage of people actually cut this up and recycle it? The stranger part was the ice packs. A thick plastic, they stated that the contents was non-toxic and encouraged people to “throw away the contents and recycle the plastic”. But how do you discard the contents, which is a soon-to-be-melted frozen liquid?
I made what might have been a mistake by deciding I’d just cut them open and let them melt into my sink, resulting in a strange, sludgy mess that took a surprisingly long time to full melt and made me fear I was clogging up my pipes. (I eventually poured boiling water down the pipes to ensure it flushed through). I won’t do that again. But then where are we supposed to discard the contents, because I’m for sure not going to just pour that into my trashcan and without emptying the bag, how can you recycle the plastic?
The plastic bags that are used to ship the pre-measured ingredients are also surprisingly non-recyclable too, meant to be discarded directly to the local landfill. This puzzled me more than anything; why not use recyclable plastic for this simple task?
Ultimately, I acknowledge that a lot of this comes down to convenience and food safety. I received a full meal ready-to-prep in a box and about 30 minutes of work produced a delish dish. Most of the packaging is appropriately recyclable, but there were a few things that ended up in the trash. For a company that has “green” in its name, the question is when will Green Chef be 100% recyclable?