2020 has seen a huge surge in people interested in home cooking, becoming the year of home kitchen cuisine. As Wired note on their round up of current subscription services, meal kits are so hot that many major manufacturers are unable to keep up with demand. With this explosion of interest has come and increase in quality, too; so much so that home chefs can prepare restaurant quality grub yet enjoy it sitting at home in comfort, in front of their favorite TV show.
An easy way in
The first benefit that meal boxes offer is a time benefit. All of the planning required for the meal is done by the company, meaning that families – who are, according to The Atlantic, increasingly starved of time – can get cooking as soon as they’re home. That means they’re much less likely to go to tried and tested easy meals, or whatever is in the cupboard, and will instead tend towards new and more creative meals. As subscription boxes offer a huge range of diverse meals, this means that more and more meals are finding their way into the week night kitchen, as are the techniques that come with them.
Learning how to cook
By presenting these meals that might not have come to mind when planning the weekly cooking rotation, food boxes create an environment in which to learn. That extra time can be put towards knife skills, the intricacies of heat levels in the oven, or even something as simple as common flavor combinations. Time and love can be poured into cooking, and the results will be delicious, especially with good ingredients.
Proper ingredients
Most subscription boxes prize themselves on sourcing good quality ingredients. As a result, home cooks can start to learn what constitutes a fresh or tasty bit of produce. As outlined by Business Insider, best before and use by dates are often mandated by legal regulations or corporate policy – not the actual quality of the produce. Getting your hands on more types of produce on a more frequent basis helps to stop this issue, and helps home cooks to get comfortable with their food again.
Bring these factors together, and you have the perfect learning environment. The home kitchen, rather than being a place of quick and easy meals or frustration, becomes a place of love and lavish food. Over time, the prevalence of these boxes may dwindle – but they’ll have done the good work of promoting the home cook to new levels.
Photo by Margherita Turrin on Unsplash
