Like great home-made food but fed up with throwing away food because your weekly plans have changed? Me too. Gousto could be our saviour because this company which began life in 2011 was set up for people like us in mind. The guys behind the brand loved cooking but didn’t have much time to go searching out ingredients. They found ready meals did the job relatively well but got boring and were full of additives so they set up Gousto. The concept is simple. You choose what you fancy to eat and the number of people you want to cater for. They deliver a bag containing the recipe and all the ingredients to wherever you want (if they deliver in your area). The recipes have been created by chefs and tested on their critical friends. Every week the choice is different so you don’t catch repetitive diet syndrome and you get a delivery once a week with everything you need. When you’re on holiday or have a few nights when you’re not around, you can put your subscription on hold.
You don’t have to be Gordon Ramsay either. Each recipe has a star or stars to match the difficulty of the dish from beginner to intermediate yet even the most timid cook can up the ante and improve their cookery skills. There’s no weighing, no measuring, no buying because everything you need – including the recipes – come in a brown carrier bag which has a chiller pack inside. Choose from ingredients for two, four or six people – great for dinner parties.
My bag was delivered on Wednesday at my office, just after 6pm as arranged.
I was sent ingredients for two recipes for two people and both had a ‘best before’ sticker so I knew which meal had to be cooked first. I had ordered a meat and a vegetarian dish and it was rather exciting unpacking the bag because I had forgotten what I’d chosen.
So I have lamb ragout ingredients and
the ingredients for feta stuffed Romano peppers.
Each recipe is very clear, wipe clean and make your journey from raw to cooked absolutely foolproof.
I’m a pretty confident cook but these guys have simplified the process and taken the scare factor out of cooking decent, restaurant-quality meals.
The lamb ragout process was easy, minimal chopping of onion, garlic and the lamb. The artichokes were in a tin so needed chopping roughly.
I took pictures of the various stages but to publish them all, will be more than dull so here’s the dish in the last stages – just before the linguine was dropped into boiling, salted water.
And the completed meal with a sprinkling of fresh Parmesan (which wasn’t in the pack).
I think I ate rather poorly for the next two nights and then prepared the second dish. The peppers were a breeze and after cutting them in half – probably the trickiest part – and de-seeding and removing the membranes, all that was left to do was stuff them. Pre cooked in a hot oven, the giant cous cous was boiled with a vegetable stock cube. Feta cheese was chopped into small cubes and the baby plum tomatoes chopped into quarters. These were all added together with chopped coriander and the peppers filled and put into the oven.
The baby potatoes were boiled, split and natural yogurt added. Here’s the finished dish.
The quality of the food and more importantly the taste was totally down to the ingredients and combination of them all. That’s what you get when you bring the experts in and if you want to cook those dishes again, you have the recipe cards to go shopping yourself.
The food maths work out as follows:
Gourmet Box 3 meals for 2 people £42.00 – £7.00 per meal
Veggie Box 3 meals for 2 people £39.00 – £6.50 per meal
I trialled the two dishes as a guest of Gousto. You can trial them too via their website – http://www.gousto.co.uk/subscribe/
