A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Tom Rutledge, who you might remember from season 3 of MasterChef AU – he was eliminated early on so you’ll be forgiven for not remembering his name from the show, but this is more proof that a good show can lead to other things even if you don’t win.
Tom has opened the Sydney branch of HelloFresh, a company that supplies a virtually complete solution that saves you time and allows you to discover new foods. They want to make cooking a healthy meal at home as fuss-free and as easy as possible for busy people that don’t necessarily have time to shop. You pay a subscription (that you can cancel at any time – no contracts), and each week they send you a goodie bag filled with ingredients, and recipes that show you in clear easy steps how to recreate the meals with the ingredients supplied. There are a few options that you can select, either three meals a week, or five meals a week, for however many people you want. On their site you can select to receive meals for two, four or six people, but if you needed more you should just select the same option multiple times, or I’m sure you can just call them and arrange it over the phone. The meals work out to between $9.30 & $9.94 per meal per person depending on the options selected.
We received a bag with enough for a single meal for two people, and the meal for us was Grilled Moroccan Beef with Zucchini & Coriander Salad.
The contents of the bag: recipe, zucchini, mint, coriander, onion (that was actually not required), garlic, chillies, capsicum, and rump steak. All the ingredients are supplied fresh from the suppliers, which means that there may be some substitutions depending on what’s available at the time. The steak we noted came from Establishment 218.
The produce was all of good quality, and there were many leftover items to make something new with the following day.
The recipe for the day gives measurements for the amount of people that you have been supplied for, and a simple six step method for cooking the meal. We found the method to be straight forward. HelloFresh assumes that you have certain items already in your pantry, which they state on their website, although the recipe called for red wine vinegar, which is not on their list, and we did not have any. We did however have balsamic vinegar (which is on the list) and so just used that, and it worked pretty well.
To be honest I was wondering if I would like the salad, since I dislike coriander, but we made it as per the recipe, with the exception of the crushed garlic as I refuse to eat raw garlic, and it was actually very nice. I also wasn’t sure about eating raw zucchini, but it was surprisingly good in a salad, especially sliced into ribbons with the potato peeler. Excellent tip!
The final meal, single portion, rump steak (cooked medium-well) with capsicum, zucchini and coriander salad. It was very nice, the steak was particularly good – I much prefer fillet, but was pleasantly surprised with the quality and taste of the rump steak, and the salad was lovely. The meal took approximately 30-45 minutes from start to finish.
At the time that we received the bag they didn’t currently deliver to our area, but I’ve just checked on their site and they now do deliver to Sydney’s North Shore, and if they don’t deliver to your area we’ve been told that they are expanding delivery to other Sydney suburbs. We could have them deliver to our office in Bondi Junction, but I didn’t fancy the idea of carting a couple of bags with six or ten meals worth of food all the way home on the train. 
Their delivery hours are outside of typical work hours (5-9pm) which makes it easy to be home when they deliver, however if you’re not at home, with prior arrangement they can leave your bags in a cool dry place, or with a neighbour. As I said earlier, there are no contracts, so you can stop whenever you want, with a 10 day notice period, and you can also put deliveries on hold when you are away.
We were very happy with the service, although Tom personally delivered ours during the day, and we were very happy with the quality of the meat, produce and recipe. We are keen to make use of HelloFresh ourselves.
We also have a special offer for you! Place an order with HelloFresh via their website, and enter the code “damnfinefood”, and you’ll receive a 30% discount on your first delivery!
(in the interests of full disclosure, this review is a true representation of how we feel about the quality of food and service provided by HelloFresh, in our option. We are not affiliated with HelloFresh in any way, however we were offered a “kickback” of 20% per subscription (first delivery only) for all orders received using the discount code. We decided to accept that offer – hey, it’s free money after all, and will make use of any credit to receive our own bags of food from HelloFresh! If you feel that that may have tainted our review, you’re welcome to that opinion, but I can assure you that we would have reviewed accordingly if things had gone differently, and this was agreed beforehand with Tom.)
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I might even go as far as saying that Cordon Bleu ranks as one of my all time favourite dishes.
