Tovala Family Meals Review: Good Food, Lots of Salt

The garlic-herb salmon with risotto was probably one of the best family meals I’ve tried. Sliced ​​asparagus looks less attractive when drizzled with garlic butter, but is still delicious and slightly crunchy. The salmon was tender and flaky. And the sweet pea risotto had no choice but to be delicious. There was so much cheese, butter and lemon that it was a mixture of fat and acid.

That chicken parm was just a mountain of cheese and salt. It reminded me, pleasantly, of countless family meals I ate as a child in the 1980s: chicken with cheese, garlic bread, shells filled with ricotta and topped with even more cheese. The big difference is that my mother cannot cook this meal without vegetables.

And nutrition is where Towell strays a bit. Nutrition notes on that Chicken Parm meal contain 2,300 mg of sodium per serving, which is the entire daily allowance for an adult human. This is equivalent to comparable servings of Stouffer’s meat lasagna. Tovala meals contain about 10 times more cholesterol than Stouffer’s.

Many other meals followed a similar pattern, using fat and salt to flavor food. The net effect is that it tastes much more like delicious restaurant food than most people prepare at home. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.

Of the seven meals I tried, only one was a complete failure: I described the teriyaki chicken dinner to my editor as a potential cultural crime against Japan. The meal was sweet soy-soaked yellow and steamed chicken, accompanied by thick egg rolls and some loose, uncooked broccoli. It felt like you could get “Japanese” food at a food court in a mall in the 90’s. But then again, this was a rare big mistake.

A more alarming issue is the almost universally high fat, cholesterol and sodium content in meals designed for the entire family. Many people with incomes like Tovala and a tendency to eat nutritious food with less effort are either parents with children, or people in retirement. Everyone has their own reason for wanting a little more nutrition, less fat and salt.

By the end of a few weeks of recipe testing, I’ll admit I felt a little relieved. I was grateful to feel my arteries slowly reopening. Tovala’s culinary model makes a lot of sense to me, because it’s a smart way to split the difference between prepared food and fresh food. And the company has proven that it can cook well. It might be good if they created a diet that seemed more sustainable.

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