Other international cuisines have less reliable translations.
The essence of the Moroccan tagine is the hours it spends braising and caramelizing in a conical clay pot. The challenge for the meal kit is to translate it into 45-minute meals. The chefs at Marley Spoon achieved this on Beef and Apricot Tagine by letting the massive onions and carrots brown rapidly rather than slowly caramelizing and using ground beef in place of more cuts that would require slower cooking.
The flavors, a blend of almonds and dried apricots and North African Baharat spices, were delicious. Cooking was easy and effortless with minimal preparation. When the recipe called for 30 to 40 minutes of cooking, this was indeed true. But the dish doesn’t have the depth or sweetness of long-roasted meat and onions. It was the Rachael Ray version of Global Cooking, where we get real with ourselves and admit that we don’t want to work so hard.
An Indian-derived keema matar was a similarly tired-as-the-original version, made with tomato paste and cento tomato sauce: it resembled, more than anything, a garam masala sloppy joe. That said, it promised to be a 20 minute recipe and it almost achieved that.
A similar effect came with the Crispy Rice and Braised-Beef Bibimbap Oven Bake, which involved crisping pre-cooked jasmine rice in an aluminum baking tray. Making my own samjang was a fun little exercise, and I’ll always prefer beef over lightly crunchy rice. But the resulting meal was no substitute for spicy and pan-fried beef with crispy rice on the stone.
moving forward
Photograph: Matthew Korfage
These streamlined dishes are no problem, however, the excellent cooking techniques of classic recipes remain the backbone and main strength of Marley Spoon. Many families will be happy with 15-minute meals as a weeknight option. Meal kits are designed for ease. A meal kit gives you a roadmap to flavors you can’t reach on your own, streamlining the effort. I enjoyed each of Marley’s 15-minute dishes on its own merits, the way you enjoy a breezy ride on a short track.
Microwavable meals are even more convenient, although I don’t highly recommend them. And the ready-to-mix market salad offered rough, steamy kale and a supermarket can of Caesar dressing, the main flavor of which was soybean oil.
This renewed focus on ease of preparation shows what kind of meal kit the Marley Spoon really is. If it was the first meal kit that was best at the basics, now it’s competing on exactly the same basis as HelloFresh: variety, convenience, exotic globetrotting flavors. It is less clear whether it will be as successful in doing so.
Marley Spoon still performs best when he plays to his strengths. Good cooking. Good recipe development. Chefs who make real food.
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