Marley Spoon Meal Kit Review 2026: Less Martha, More Moroccan

This included a Persian turmeric chicken with dill and currant rice that fits perfectly into Marley Spoon’s repertoire, deglazed with lemon juice instead of wine. The rice was grilled, then cooked with currants and spinach. It was simple, elegant and quite a treat. Among the pan-Asian dishes, this was the most successful.

Other international dishes are less accurate translations.

The essence of a Moroccan tagine lies in the hours it spends braising and caramelizing in a conical clay pot. The challenge of a meal kit is translating that into a 45-minute meal. The chefs at Marley Spoon achieved this with a beef and apricot tagine largely by calling for quickly browning the onions and carrots rather than slowly caramelizing them, and by using ground beef in place of a richer cut that would require slower cooking.

The flavors, a blend of almond and dried apricot and North African baharat spices, were delicious. The cook was simple and intuitive, with minimal preparation. When the recipe called for 30 to 40 minutes of cooking, that was indeed true. But the dish lacks the depth and sweetness of the long-braised meat and onion. It was the Rachael Ray version of global cuisine, the one where we get real with ourselves and admit we don’t want to try so hard.

A keema matar of Indian origin was also the version for tired parents, made with tomato paste and Cento tomato sauce: it looked more than anything like a sloppy joe garam masala. That said, this promised to be a 20 minute recipe and I almost made it.

A similar effect arrived with a crispy rice and braised beef bibimbap bake, which involved crisping precooked jasmine rice in an aluminum baking sheet. Making my own ssamjang was a fun little exercise, and I will always love beef over lightly crisped rice. But the resulting meal is no substitute for marinated, wok-fried beef with crispy rice on a stone.

Moving forward

Photography: Matthieu Korfhage

These simplified recipes are no problem, although the excellent cooking technique of the classic recipes remains the backbone and main strength of Marley Spoon. Many households will enjoy 15-minute weekday meals. Ease is what a meal kit is designed for. A meal kit gives you a road map to flavors you wouldn’t have been able to achieve on your own, while streamlining the effort. I enjoyed each of Marley’s 15-minute dishes on its merits, the same way you enjoy a breezy ride on a short trail.

Microwave meals are even more convenient, although I don’t really recommend them. And a ready-to-mix market salad offered raw, stem-based kale and a supermarket Ken’s Caesar dressing, whose main flavor note was soybean oil.

This renewed emphasis on ease of preparation amounts to a repositioning of the type of meal kit that Marley Spoon really is. If before it was the meal kit that was best on the fundamentals, it now apparently competes on the same ground as HelloFresh: variety, convenience, light globe-trotting flavors. What is less clear is whether it will achieve this as successfully.

Marley Spoon always does best when she plays to her strengths. Good cooking. Good recipe development. Chefs who prepare real meals.