Review: Marley Spoon Meal Kit

This included a Persian turmeric chicken with dill-currant rice that fits seamlessly into Marley Spoon’s repertoire, deglazing with lemon juice instead of wine. The rice was toasted, then cooked with currants and spinach. It was simple, elegant, and kind of a treat. Among the pan-Asian dishes, this was the most successful.

Other international meals are less faithful translations.

The essence of a Moroccan tagine is the hours it spends braising and caramelizing in a conical clay pot. The challenge for a meal kit is translating this to a 45-minute meal. Marley Spoon’s chefs achieved this on a beef and apricot tagine largely by calling for fast-browning the onions and carrots rather than slowly caramelizing them, and using ground beef in place of a richer cut that would require a slower cook.

The flavors, a mix of almond and dried apricot and northern African baharat spice, were delicious. The cook was easy and intuitive, with minimal prep. When the recipe called for 30 to 40 minutes of cooking, it was actually true. But the dish doesn’t contain the depth or sweetness of long-braised meat and onion. It was the Rachael Ray version of global cooking, the one where we get real with ourselves and admit we don’t want to try so hard.

An Indian-derived keema matar was likewise the tired-parent version, made with tomato paste and Cento tomato sauce: It resembled, more than anything, a garam masala sloppy joe. This said, it promised to be a 20-minute recipe, and nearly achieved this.

A similar effect arrived with a crispy rice and braised-beef bibimbap oven bake, which involved crisping up pre-cooked jasmine rice in an aluminum baking tray. Making my own ssamjang was a fun little exercise, and I’ll always like beef over lightly crispy rice. But the resulting meal was no substitute for marinated and wok-fried beef with rice crisped on a stone.

Moving Forward

These streamlined recipes aren’t a problem, though the excellent cooking technique of the classic recipes remains Marley Spoon’s backbone and chief strength. Many households will be glad of the 15-minute meals as a weeknight option. Ease is what a meal kit is designed to do. A meal kit gives you a roadmap to flavors you wouldn’t have arrived at yourself, while streamlining effort. I enjoyed each of Marley’s 15-minute dishes on its merits, the way you enjoy a breezy ride on a short track.

The microwavable meals are further convenience, though I don’t overly recommend them. And a ready-to-mix market salad offered rough, stemmy kale and supermarket Ken’s Caesar, whose main flavor note was soybean oil.

This renewed focus on ease of prep does amount to a repositioning of what kind of meal kit Marley Spoon actually is. If Marley Spoon was previously the meal kit that stood best on fundamentals, it’s now competing on seemingly the exact same ground as HelloFresh: variety, convenience, breezy globetrotting flavors. What’s less clear is whether it will be as successful in doing so.

Marley Spoon still fares best when it hews to its strengths. Good cooking. Good recipe development. Chefs who make real meals.