4 ms·

Just wait until these people discover that these "recipes" are available in things called "cookbooks" that they can purchase without subscribing to a meal servi

• robodale 8y ago
  ...and then they discover they can get "recipes" from any number of "websites", for free, and without even buying a cookbook!
• jerkstate 8y ago
  the main thing that meal kit services did for me was automate shopping and variety. Now I use a non-kit shopping list/recipe service that lets me pick from a recipe list at the beginning of the week and puts a shopping list together for me, and shop once a week. We have very little food waste (compared to shopping for ingredients then needing to fit them into a recipe) and it's very time-efficient (compared to choosing recipes and manually compiling a shopping list from recipes in a cookbook).
• untog 8y ago
  That's not really the point. Shopping for a dozen individual ingredients for a recipe is time consuming, and is one reason why people are more inclined to try these meal kit boxes. Selling a pre-packaged meal kit in a store still keeps the time-saving benefits, and removes the shipping difficulty.
  • bhandziuk 8y ago
    Usually those dozen ingredients are things like spices which you might only buy once every 6 months+ (so next time you make that recipe there are only 4 ingredients) or they're staples (flour, pasta) or fresh consumables which are shared between many recipes (onion, garlic, cheese). So if you're cooking at home a lot your grocery list is often the same thing every time plus a few odd items periodically even if you make different things every week.
• nahh_bro 8y ago
  That's a load of shit, because prep work is a bitch, and clean up is a bitch. It's not just the part about the shopping list of commodity raw materials. But, most eating habits are incidental to immediate cravings, when faced with a wide variety of choices. So put a full catalogue of menu items in front of a person, and ask them what they'll really want two Friday's from now. If you had to choose now, what you'll eat in exactly two weeks, on the dot, between sushi and green tea, or hamburgers and milkshakes, or soup and a sandwich, how do you know you'll even want it when it arrives? And when it does, and you don't, how hard will it be to not eat it, toss it in the fridge, and go get the food you really want at that moment? And then, what was all that planning effort for?
• munchbunny 8y ago
  Recipe curation is a genuinely hard problem. I often go diving into cookbooks for recipes, and I've noticed that in general I will try 2-3 recipes for each one I might add to my repertoire. I think cookbooks are often just making stuff up to fill pages, and as a result the many of the recipes are just mediocre, with a few good ones sprinkled in.
  • groby_b 8y ago
    Serious recommendation - trash recipe books, unless you're interested in recreating a specific kind of flavor. Then, learn about proper ratios. (Best book I've found so far is "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking"). And then get yourself a copy of the flavor bible, which makes it easy to create excellent flavor combinations. You're set for life. (You might at some point add cooking chemistry into the mix, too. But the point is, learn to make recipes yourself, so you know they're tailored to what you like. Instead of having to try them one by one)
    • grawprog 8y ago
      I can't remember the last time I actually cooked using a recipe. The only thing I use them for these days is a quick glance at the general ingredients in a dish for something i've never made before, or any special cooking instructions. Cooking is more about knowing the properties and flavours of your ingredients and knowing which work well together. Once you know that, you can make pretty much anything. Baking though i'd say is an exception. The ratios of ingredients and the orser you combine and the methods you use are fairly important to get exact. Baking is a lot like chemistry. I've also been lucky enough to have a copy of this book lying around. https://www.amazon.ca/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals-5th/dp/013715576X https://www.amazon.ca/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals... I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you want to work in a kitchen, but it's pretty awesome.
    • munchbunny 8y ago
      That's great advice, but I'd like to add another consideration: cooking advice is often specific to cultural context. I can't speak for your specific recommendations because I haven't read them, but other books in the category do have this issue. I primarily cook Chinese food, and as a result general technique guidance coming from Western techniques tends to work to the extent that green beans are green beans, but tends to translate imperfectly to the extent that a cast iron skillet is not a wok, dumpling dough and pasta dough are made differently and handled differently, etc. As a result, I sort of have two different kitchens in my kitchen, there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for Chinese food (and often other Asian cuisines), and there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for when I make Western dishes.
• deadmetheny 8y ago
  I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the people who jump into these things never really had a parent who cooked, or if they did were never really all that interested in learning until later in life and these kits may have helped them along in that regard. This isn't meant to be passing judgement on anyone, btw, just an observation in general of how people seem to progress from these things. Either they do their own shopping and learn to cook for real, or they go back to mostly eating out.
  • will123195 8y ago
    A year of Blue Apron elevated my cooking game from zero to quite good actually. Now that I've learned some technique, I prefer buying groceries instead of getting the ridiculous single serve vinegar/ketchup/mayo bottles and not-quite-as-fresh protein they send you.
    • pessimizer 8y ago
      I feel this is the real curse for these meal services: the customers they're most successful with will get better at cooking fairly quickly and eventually start shopping for themselves.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        Businesses can certainly work servicing customers who graduate from needing them. Think, well, universities. Or dating services. Or anything catering to a particular age group. But the churn economics need to work.
• skywhopper 8y ago
  It's clear you don't understand the value people find in the service.