Gousto Recipe Box Review

I’m a big fan of subscription boxes (especially Geek Box and Birchbox). But I’ve always been a bit reluctant to buy the food recipe boxes. After all, I like to cook when I get the chance, I live near a supermarket and there’s plenty of access to recipes online. But friends of mine have been raving about some of the recipe boxes that have popped up over the last 18 months or so and the lovely folks at Gousto offered me the chance to try out one of their recipe boxes, I thought I would see what the fuss was about.

How it works

Each week, the website displays a new set of menus of amazing looking meals. You simply select how many meals and servings you would like and the frequency you would like to receive them (weekly, monthly etc.) – or once you’ve made your first order you can choose to stop the subscription until a later date. Prices start from £27.49 for a box of two recipes for two people.

What do you get?

On the delivery day of your choice, everything you need to make your selected meals arrives in special packaging, designed to keep your food fresh for many hours if you aren’t there to receive it. Randomly, I found good use for the packaging. The reusable ice-packs now live in the freezer for when I have a migraine and the sheep’s wool insulation was given to my very grateful neighbour, who loves to compost.

Also in the package are recipe cards with step-by-step, photographic instructions on how to cook the recipe. As a nice touch, there was also a very good quality Gousto wooden spoon.

Easy to follow recipes

For my meals, I chose French Chicken, Bacon and Mushroom Stew and Halloumi with Cous Cous and Pomegranate Molasses. I read through the recipe card a few times to familiarise myself with the method. Chopped all the ingredients and got to it.

We enjoyed cooking the recipes together, especially as these were new recipes for us. And both were really tasty. The halloumi dish was especially a surprise as we are one of those families that don’t consider anything a meal unless it has meat or fish in it. We’ve decided to have vegetarian meals more often from now on.

Would I buy it again?

Yes, I definitely would, maybe not on a weekly basis but I enjoyed the fact that my boyfriend and I had a lot of fun cooking the recipes together and the recipes were very well put together. There was no wastage of ingredients and for once we had the right portion sizes. Like a lot of people, we are guilty of cooking recipes for four and eating them between us in one go.

Even though there are thousands of recipes online, these probably weren’t something I would have looked for. The Halloumi, which was Lebanese, was full of flavours from spices I don’t have in my cupboard.

On a per serving basis, it might be a bit more expensive than getting the ingredients from one of the cheaper supermarkets but as I said, there’s absolutely no wastage of ingredients and it is definitely cheaper than going out to a restaurant.