Gluten-free cuisine has a deservedly bad reputation. This is not because wheat has a monopoly on good taste: Entire countries and cultures would disagree. Rather, it’s that cooks far too often make things that desperately need gluten to be what they are: pancakes and waffles, say, or Southern fried chicken. Or, lord help us, pizza.
And so every time I’ve tried out gluten-free plates among the many meal kits I’ve reviewed, it’s been with a little bit of fear—lest I find myself endlessly chewing a tapioca pancake, or breaking my own heart over a tray of limp zoodles.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Which is all a prelude to say: The gluten-free meals from HelloFresh’s organic meal-kit brand Green Chef were a hell of a nice surprise. More than half of Green Chef’s recipes are gluten-free, a quality that the brand attests with hearty, full-throated validation from the Seattle-based Gluten Intolerance Group, which offers certification for gluten-free ingredients and restaurants.
More on that validation and what it means, in a bit. But first, I’ll say that among a week’s worth of gluten-free meals from Green Chef, I didn’t miss the gluten. I didn’t miss it, because aside from a swap of gluten-free amino sauce (here’s one popular brand) in lieu of a little soy sauce, none of the meals would or should have had gluten in them anyway.
Rather than make pale imitations of gluteny things, Green Chef’s meals were dishes that never needed wheat in the first place. This might include a kale and quinoa grilled chicken bowl with North African spice, steaks in red pepper sauce with green peas and rice, or a rice bowl topped with cabbage and honey ginger shrimp.
Each was a fully realized and appetizing meal, which took between a half hour and an hour for me to prepare after receiving a box of ingredients and recipe cards from Green Chef in the mail. None felt like an ingredient was missing. Here’s how Green Chef works.
Organic, Hearty, Quite Often Gluten-Free
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Founded in Boulder, Colorado, Green Chef was once a competitor to HelloFresh (7/10, WIRED Review), the German-founded meal-kit brand that has helped establish meal kits as a successful business model in dozens of countries. When HelloFresh snapped up Green Chef in 2018, the meal-kit titan positioned Green Chef as its organic alternative: Green Chef advertises that all of its produce and eggs are organic, unless specified otherwise. (The meat is currently the same meat, mostly, used by HelloFresh’s other brands, mostly higher-end commodity cuts from legacy American purveyors and producers.)