Cooking dinner every night can be time-consuming and sometimes even overwhelming, but opting to eat out instead adds up quickly, especially when compared to cooking at home. If you’re looking for a happy medium to help you out with weekly dinners, meal kits may become your very best friend.
During my testing at CNET, I’ve become a fan of services like Blue Apron, Marley Spoon and HelloFresh. And lately, while preparing for the holidays and an upcoming move, a large chunk of my free time (and maybe even brain power) has been claimed, so I’ve found myself leaning toward a specific type of meal lately. No, I’m not talking about a protein preference; I’m talking about sheet-pan meals. Here’s why I love them.
Sheet-pan meals simplify cooking
Lately, as I’m scouring meal kit service websites, I’ve noticed that more and more sheet-pan recipes are appearing. These are meals that cook all at once in the oven on one or two sheet pans and require very little preparation.
This sheet-pan meal — roasted salmon and veggies — is from Blue Apron and took only 30 minutes to make.
In my experience, these types of meals shorten overall cooking time. While the entire meal (sides included) is baking, I have time to clean up the little mess I made while preparing the meal, and even end up with a bit of relaxation time. With sheet-pan meals, I can still enjoy a home-cooked meal in a fraction of the time it usually takes to cook dinner. It’s a win-win situation in my book.
Some sheet-pan meals take only five minutes of active work
While some meals still require a little bit of prep work, like chopping or dicing vegetables, others, like the one above, need almost none. For my salmon dish, all I had to do was season the salmon with salt and pepper, rinse the produce and snap off the tips of the green beans. The whole process took me less than five minutes. Some recipes even come with pre-cut vegetables to save more time.
Sheet-pan meals are often cooked in the oven, but I recently experimented with making a couple in the Wonder Oven Pro, and they turned out just as well. If you have a toaster oven that’s large enough for your meal, you can absolutely use it instead of using your traditional wall oven, if you prefer.
I made this honey mustard chicken from Blue Apron in the Wonder Oven Pro. While it was cooking, I prepared the salad.
One-pot or one-pan meals are just as easy
You may also see some meals labeled as one-pan meals instead of sheet-pan meals, but there is only a slight difference between them. Sheet-pan meals are often cooked in the oven while one-pan (or one-pot) meals are cooked on the stovetop. However, both types offer essentially the same thing: a full meal cooked in a single piece of cookware rather than several. You can think of these types of meals as a way to have less mess, less cooking stress — and still a homemade dinner.
Do all meal delivery services have sheet-pan meals?
It’s hard to say definitively that every single service offers sheet-pan meals since there are so many available, but most of the services we’ve tested do.
Some recent recipes we’ve seen include sheet pan pork and hoisin-glazed persimmon from Blue Apron, one-pan cantina shrimpfajitas from HelloFresh and low-carb sheet pan cabbage parm from Marley Spoon.
Home Chef also offers sheet-pan meals. Many of the recipes also recommend laying down foil to make cleaning a breeze.
Aside from making weeknight dinners easier, my favorite thing about these types of recipes is that they’re usually very easy to recreate, with or without the meal kit. The salmon dish above, for instance, has become a part of my weekly dinner rotation even when a meal kit isn’t helping me stay fed.
Another new trend worth mentioning…
You may already know how useful having an air fryer can be, and it seems as though meal kit companies are catching on, too.
On numerous recipes, Blue Apron now offers alternative air fryer instructions for specific steps. So instead of turning on your oven for a potato or veggie side, the service details how you can prepare them in the air fryer instead.
I used the air fryer instructions to cook the broccoli in this meal.
Although there aren’t currently recipes that are fully cooked in the air fryer in the same way sheet-pan meals are prepared, there are plenty that can help cut down cooking time. We suspect that additional meal kit companies will soon cater to this trend as well.
