A garlic-herb salmon with risotto was probably the best among the family meals I tried. The chopped asparagus was less than visually appealing when drizzled in garlic butter, but still tasty and a bit crisp. The salmon was tender and flaky. And the sweet pea risotto had no choice but to be delicious. There was so much cheese, butter, and lemon it was pretty much a concert of fats and acid.

That chicken parm was likewise a mountain of cheese and salt. It reminded me, pleasantly, of countless family meals I had as a child in the 1980s: cheese-topped chicken, garlic bread, shells stuffed with ricotta and topped with even more cheese. The big difference is that there is simply no way my mother would have cooked this meal without a vegetable.

Toval app via Matthew Korfhage

And nutrition is where Toval runs aground a little. The nutritional notes on that chicken parm meal betray 2,300 milligrams of sodium per serving, pretty much the entire daily allowance for an adult human. This is also on par with comparable servings of Stouffer’s meat lasagna. The Tovala meal also carried about 10 times the cholesterol as Stouffer’s.

Many other meals followed a similar pattern, loading up on fats and salt in order to make meals tasty. The net effect is that it’s a lot more like rich restaurant food than what most people prepare at home. Whether this is a good or a bad quality is up to you.

Only one meal of the seven I tried failed utterly: I flagged a teriyaki chicken dinner to my editor as a possible cultural crime against Japan. The meal was sweet soy drenching pale and steaming chicken, with an implausible side of thick egg rolls and some loose, unseasoned broccoli. It felt like the “Japanese” food you’d get at a mall food court in the ’90s. But again, this was a rare major misstep.

A more pernicious issue, in meals designed for the whole family, is the near-universal high-fat, cholesterol, and sodium content. Many with the income and inclination to eat hearty, low-effort meals like the ones from Tovala are either parents with children, or people in the retirement bracket. Each has their own reason to desire a little more nutrition, and less fat and salt.

By the end of a couple of weeks of testing recipes, I’ll admit I felt a little relieved. I was grateful to feel my arteries slowly reopen. Tovala’s culinary model makes a lot of sense to me, as a smart way of splitting the difference between prepared meals and fresh food. And the company has proven it can cook well. It might be nice if they’d also cook a diet that felt more sustainable.

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