Pre-prepped ingredients delivered to the door help anyone make their favorite restaurant dishes at home

Forage turns home cooks into pro chefs by providing all of the ingredients needed to make dishes culled from the menus of top US restaurants.

Cooking a good meal can take up far too much of the little time most people have, a fact that contributes to the huge amounts of money that the average consumer spends on eating out each year. While services such as Brazil’s Gulala have aimed to make things easier with 24-hour delivery of ingredients for meals, Forage turns home cooks into pro chefs by providing all of the ingredients needed to make dishes culled from the menus of top US restaurants.

Rather than heading out of the house to join the queues waiting to get a seat at venues such as Alta in New York or San Francisco’s Dosa, Forage has curated a selection of some of the most popular dishes from those restaurants. Using recipes created by pro chefs, the service enables members to receive all of the ingredients they need to make famous dishes, pre-prepared. More difficult parts of the recipe, such as making rich sauces or finely chopping ingredients, are already done by the Forage team to chef specifications. Since most of the work is already done for them, cooks can serve up in around 20 minutes, quicker than the average takeaway delivery. Each meal kit costs USD 60 and contains enough ingredients for 4 people — essentially USD 15 a head. Deliveries are made once a week, but subscribers can choose to roll the charge over if they don’t feel like cooking one week.

Forage has already received angel investment from big names such as Twitter founder and Medium CEO Evan Williams and Whole Foods board member Hass Hassan. Initially available in Los Angeles and San Francisco, it plans to expand to eight states throughout 2014. Can services such as these really help home cooks to make restaurant-standard dishes at home?