You Be Chef, Michelin Star Food at Home – Review
Updated: May 23, 2024
It’s your turn to cook again, you’ve promised something special so your go-to spag bol just isn’t going to cut it. You furiously sift through your cookbooks or search online for that killer recipe, then head out to buy the 20 ingredients from that specialist food shop only to find that the 1 key ingredient that only grows on a remote Himalayan hillside is not in stock. Sound stressful?
What if you could calmly rustle up a Michelin Star style three-course dinner to impress the socks off your loved without even breaking a sweat. Well that’s precisely what You Be Chef claim to do with their cook-at-home meal kits. Eager to impress we gave it a go and this is how it went.
On the You Be Chef website you select how many people you are cooking for, add any food preferences then choose your dishes. This step is completely customisable and you can order any combination of starters mains and desserts. For the chancers out there you could order three desserts if you really wanted to, along with additional extras such as the weekly bake (more on this later) and good old cheese board. Playing straight, we opted for a classic starter, main and dessert combo with the weekly bake on top.
Each element of the kit arrived in neatly packed portions, all prepared, clearly labeled with the meal they belonged to and a personalised pack of recipe cards for each dish. For those that need a little extra guidance with the techniques involved, each card has a QR code, taking you to a handy step-by-step video on how to prepare each course. We found this really useful as a guide to make sure our dishes looked on point.
The Weekly Bake
Assuming this is on a weekly rotation, this weeks snack-like course is Heritage Beetroot Crackers, Smoked Beetroot Gel and Fried Capers. Taking literally 5 minutes to put together, the result is an eye-catching bowl of pink savoury crispbread, with polka dotted sweet gel and salty capers. We can’t take too much credit for the presentation as we are guided by the video, but with unsuspecting guests, we totally would.
Starter
With newfound confidence after course one, we stride into the starter of Croquettes of Slow Cooked Lamb Shoulder with Red Onion Cucumber, Feta Cheese, Black Olive and Mint. This is another dish that looks as stunning as it tastes, we would hands down order this in a restaurant. The crunchy mini disks of succulent crumbed lamb are accompanied with curled towers of cucumber and scattered with the various other ingredients to look like a sort of spring flowerbed. Totally a deconstructed Greek salad with delicious sweet and salty flavours.
Main
Possibly the trickiest dish to cook, but only because there are few things to heat, so if you can use an oven and a timer you should have this nailed. After only a few minutes of simmering, warming and carefully stacking the various elements of the dish, we have a Masterchef ready plate of deliciously buttery and tender cod with a touch of heat and a smokey undertone of the charred salsify.
Dessert
OK so this dish is mostly unwrapping and putting things together on a plate, but as there is a 2 minute warming process we are still claiming we “made” it. The Warm 70% Saint Domingue Dark Chocolate Tart with Japanese Whiskey and Orange Parfait, and Confit Clementine is even more devilish than the devilled shrimp butter in the previous dish. It’s got all the velvety dark, sweet, tangy and bitter notes singing together in perfect harmony.
Over the last few years, cook your own food kits have flourished but the You Be Chef version really does give you the ingredients and hand holding to create and serve dishes that has a wow factor. Even though we know how easy it was to put together, we still impressed ourselves.
To view all of the meal kits available visit – YouBeChef.com
Written by Rick Hartley
