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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.
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
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.)
As with most other meal kits on the market, Green Chef has a membership model. You sign up for three or four meals a week, in portions ranging from two to six servings, and then you choose which recipes you want sent the following week. Prices for Green Chef are $12 per serving, plus $11 per week for shipping, placing it among the most expensive meal kits at full price. As with other HelloFresh meal kits, it’s often available at a steep discount on a trial basis.
Also, as with HelloFresh’s other meal kits, you can choose which day of the week you want your meals delivered. On the appointed day, a well-organized green box will arrive with recipes and most of the ingredients you need to prepare the meals. The exceptions are basic staples like oil, butter, salt, and pepper. Each recipe comes clearly marked with allergens, whether sesame or tree nuts.
Green Chef offers keto and “protein-packed” options, as well as a small scattering of vegan meals, and attests that all of its food is “organic, sustainably sourced, and free of toxic pesticides, irradiation, sewage sludge, antibiotics, growth hormones, and steroids.” But also, more than half the menu is marked gluten-free, a rarity among the largest meal kits. The gluten-free meals arrive bearing the mark of the “Gluten-Free Safe Spot” program.
Green Chef is the first meal kit brand to be certified or validated as gluten-free by the Gluten Intolerance Group, one of few bodies that attempts to certify ingredients or restaurants as safe for the gluten-intolerant. In a conversation in May after I called to ask about the stringency of the validation process, GIG outreach director Christopher Lorenz said his organization traces every ingredient used in Green Chef’s meals, uses ISO-accredited in-person auditors, spot-checks and lab-tests delivery boxes for gluten, and also verifies that gluten-free meals are prepared in a dedicated facility.
Lorenz also checked for complaints, and found that no one had filed a complaint they’d been “glutened” by Green Chef during the years his organization had audited Green Chef’s gluten-free meals. Note that Green Chef had previously “certified” its ingredients as gluten-free through GIG’s Gluten-Free Certification Organization, a more costly process. As of 2023, said Lorenz, Green Chef is instead “validated” at the facility level the same way restaurants are, but that all ingredients are still traced, audited, or certified.
Green Chef’s Food Is Delicious, and Varied
What I am personally able to certify is that the gluten-free meals and recipes from Green Chef were consistently among the most delicious I’ve tried from a meal kit claiming to offer gluten-free food—a low bar hurdled with aplomb. Meat sourcing has always been a strong point for HelloFresh, from its premium meal kits to its budget EveryPlate kit (7/10, WIRED Recommends).
The red-pepper-sauced bavette steaks were no exception, sourced from a fourth-generation meat purveyor in Texas. The meat arrived well trimmed, juicy, and unimpeachably tender once seared on cast iron according to specifications. The rest of the recipe, which also included oven- charred broccoli and rice I cooked on a stovetop with scallions and peas, was simple to the point of elementary.
About the most complicated thing I did was cook down a cream cheese sauce with preroasted red peppers and some pan-bloomed garlic. This is not a complaint: Aside from preheating the oven, the meal actually pretty much got cooked in its allotted 30-minute prep time. (With oven heating factored in, the recipe lied as much as every other recipe I’ve ever read. But it’s cool, I’m used to it.)
The honey-ginger shrimp was even simpler: soak some shrimp in sauce, cook some cabbage and carrots and onions, then sear up the shrimp. On the side, cook up a half-cup of rice in stock. It’s hard not to see the DNA of HelloFresh in the five- to seven-step recipe cards, from the breathlessly excitable recipe descriptions to the focus on doing all the knife work before the stove gets turned on.
Without extraneous verbiage, Green Chef’s recipe card will gently walk you through the basic things you need to do to make a kale salad delicious and not tough or bitter, cutting out thick stems, massaging with oil and an acid until the leaves soften up and release their natural sweetness. Throw on some seared, spice-coated chicken and some feta and dates, and the resulting salad’s pretty much a gimme, quinoa or no quinoa.
Nowhere in any of those meals did I think about gluten or its absence. And yet each had none. Meal after meal, Green Chef’s gluten-free offerings are simple, and delicious, with nothing at all missing and nothing replaced. Sometimes simple is the hardest thing to achieve.
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