Just wait until these people discover that these "recipes" are available in things called "cookbooks" that they can purchase without subscribing to a meal service.
Recipe curation is a genuinely hard problem. I often go diving into cookbooks for recipes, and I've noticed that in general I will try 2-3 recipes for each one I might add to my repertoire. I think cookbooks are often just making stuff up to fill pages, and as a result the many of the recipes are just mediocre, with a few good ones sprinkled in.
Serious recommendation - trash recipe books, unless you're interested in recreating a specific kind of flavor.
Then, learn about proper ratios. (Best book I've found so far is "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking"). And then get yourself a copy of the flavor bible, which makes it easy to create excellent flavor combinations. You're set for life.
(You might at some point add cooking chemistry into the mix, too. But the point is, learn to make recipes yourself, so you know they're tailored to what you like. Instead of having to try them one by one)
That's great advice, but I'd like to add another consideration: cooking advice is often specific to cultural context. I can't speak for your specific recommendations because I haven't read them, but other books in the category do have this issue.
I primarily cook Chinese food, and as a result general technique guidance coming from Western techniques tends to work to the extent that green beans are green beans, but tends to translate imperfectly to the extent that a cast iron skillet is not a wok, dumpling dough and pasta dough are made differently and handled differently, etc.
As a result, I sort of have two different kitchens in my kitchen, there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for Chinese food (and often other Asian cuisines), and there's a set of tools, ingredients, and techniques for when I make Western dishes.
Great thread. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to plug Serious Eats (no affiliation, just a satisfied reader). The editor is an MIT trained chemist who also is incredible at cooking, and the recipes not only always just work, but the reason why they work gastronomically is always spelled out in very clear detail.
Outside of that, I generally have the same issue with cooking ethnic cuisine. The specialized equipment is different, it's challenging (and crucial) to get specialty ingredients, new techniques need to be learned. But, most importantly, you have to know how it's supposed to taste, otherwise it's impossible to approach cooking it properly. I was never able to make a proper mapo tofu until I had my first really really good one and realized what I was missing (good Szechuan peppercorns).
I can't remember the last time I actually cooked using a recipe. The only thing I use them for these days is a quick glance at the general ingredients in a dish for something i've never made before, or any special cooking instructions.
Cooking is more about knowing the properties and flavours of your ingredients and knowing which work well together. Once you know that, you can make pretty much anything.
Baking though i'd say is an exception. The ratios of ingredients and the orser you combine and the methods you use are fairly important to get exact. Baking is a lot like chemistry.
I've also been lucky enough to have a copy of this book lying around.
I would also recommend Niki Segnit's Lateral Cooking which aims to teach you how recipes associate with one another. So you just remember core ratios and what adjustments have to be made get other dishes. It's a very lazy-hacker way of approaching cooking that a lot of technical people will enjoy.
There's a huge difference between recipe collections, which are usually just glossy gimmick-y celebrity-endorsed and useless, and actual cookbooks, which teach you how to cook.
A cookbook will have a section on "how to prepare piece of meat X", what to think about when preparing that piece, and then some recipes centered on that piece, at different levels of work and difficulty. That shows you what directions you can take that ingredient in, what it's good for, and how to make variations on the same base ingredient.
Recipe collections never do this, everything is presented as a done deal. Here's the recipe, follow the recipe exactly. There are no connections, no progression, no explanations, no substitutions, and in the end, recipe collections never teach you how to cook.
So I'm not surprised you have issues with recipe collections. They are useless, and I wish more people knew the difference between those and real cookbooks.
These two books have nothing but good recipes. The Food Lab also explains why to cook something a certain way. My food is so much better after buying these two books.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the people who jump into these things never really had a parent who cooked, or if they did were never really all that interested in learning until later in life and these kits may have helped them along in that regard.
This isn't meant to be passing judgement on anyone, btw, just an observation in general of how people seem to progress from these things. Either they do their own shopping and learn to cook for real, or they go back to mostly eating out.
A year of Blue Apron elevated my cooking game from zero to quite good actually. Now that I've learned some technique, I prefer buying groceries instead of getting the ridiculous single serve vinegar/ketchup/mayo bottles and not-quite-as-fresh protein they send you.
I feel this is the real curse for these meal services: the customers they're most successful with will get better at cooking fairly quickly and eventually start shopping for themselves.
Businesses can certainly work servicing customers who graduate from needing them. Think, well, universities. Or dating services. Or anything catering to a particular age group. But the churn economics need to work.
That's not really the point. Shopping for a dozen individual ingredients for a recipe is time consuming, and is one reason why people are more inclined to try these meal kit boxes. Selling a pre-packaged meal kit in a store still keeps the time-saving benefits, and removes the shipping difficulty.
Usually those dozen ingredients are things like spices which you might only buy once every 6 months+ (so next time you make that recipe there are only 4 ingredients) or they're staples (flour, pasta) or fresh consumables which are shared between many recipes (onion, garlic, cheese). So if you're cooking at home a lot your grocery list is often the same thing every time plus a few odd items periodically even if you make different things every week.
the main thing that meal kit services did for me was automate shopping and variety. Now I use a non-kit shopping list/recipe service that lets me pick from a recipe list at the beginning of the week and puts a shopping list together for me, and shop once a week. We have very little food waste (compared to shopping for ingredients then needing to fit them into a recipe) and it's very time-efficient (compared to choosing recipes and manually compiling a shopping list from recipes in a cookbook).
