Yossi Foods Falafel Meal Box: Review

I enter a LOT of competitions. Probably even more since lockdown began, in all honesty! The types of prizes I win vary massively, but I’m not going to deny how excited I was to win a competition that Bristol-based Yossi Foods recently ran on Instagram.

Based in Easton-in-Gordano, Yossi Foods specialises in authentic Middle Eastern falafel. As their website explains, Yossi’s own grandfather was a “falafel pioneer”, selling his fried chickpea creations from a trolley in Old Jerusalem, before opening a shop where Yossi spent many a summer holiday helping out – including learning how to make falafel for himself.

Fast forward a few years, and Yossi is making both gluten-free falafel (a standard and a herby version) and pastes and spreads to sell to the Bristol public. The Yossi Foods home delivery service offers the falafels and spreads, alongside homemade hummus and tehina and artisan pitta breads, with delivery available to the Bristol, Bath, Yate, Clevedon and Weston areas with a minimum order of £20.

You can get a kilo of falafel (around 40 balls) for £10, so it’s pretty well-priced! And they come frozen, too, with instructions for cooking straight from the freezer, meaning you don’t need to worry about eating them all in one go.

But that’s not all they do. In the Yossi Foods online shop, you’ll also find falafel meal boxes, which come with falafel, pitta breads, salad ingredients and various dips and spreads, with prices ranging from £15 for a box that makes 2-3 portions, to £35 for the large box, which makes 10 portions.

It was the large box that I won in the Yossi Foods Instagram competition: worth £35, it includes 40 falafels, 10 pitta breads (both frozen), tahini, coriander & chilli paste, pickled lemon spread, and salad ingredients – in this case, a lettuce, a cucumber, a pepper, two red onions and four tomatoes. You give your phone number when ordering and they let you know when it’s on its way – handy, given the frozen nature of some of the contents.

When it arrived (hand-delivered to my door), I was impressed to see that they had used minimal packaging: a simple cardboard box with a Yossi Foods label, and the salad ingredients with no wasteful plastic. The pittas and falafel were still perfectly frozen, too.

Also included in the box were two pieces of paper: one including allergen advice and use-by dates for the spreads, the other explaining how to reheat the falafel and pittas, how to assemble your creations, and ideas for using up any leftover spreads.

And it really was that simple. I took as many falafel as we needed out of the bag, chucked them on a baking tray, and cooked them for 20 minutes, adding the pittas to the oven for the last 5 minutes of the cooking time. It made the kitchen smell amazing, and the falafel came out lovely and crispy.

They were proper pitta breads, too – not the poor version that you’ll find at the supermarkets. The difference was clear not only in the flavour, but in how easy they were to slice and open into pockets when warmed through.

And I think you’ll agree that the final spread looked incredible…

And we were seriously impressed with the flavours too. The pitta breads were dense and chewy (these were the wholemeal ones – the white ones are still in the freezer with the rest of the falafel), while the falafel were fairly mild in flavour, but beautifully crunchy and just as fragrant as they smelled whilst cooking.

The vibrant green coriander and chilli paste tasted beautifully fresh. I wasn’t expecting such a HUGE chilli punch – it was a bit of a surprise in the first mouthful – but the flavours were beautiful.

The tahini was super smooth with a nice bitterness, but it was the pickled lemon spread that was my favourite: beautifully sour, with the added flavour of paprika and a hint of chilli – I reckon this would also be good alongside a curry, as an alternative to lime pickle.

Obviously the two-year-old didn’t get to try the coriander and chilli spread (I’m not that cruel), but he wolfed down the rest of the meal, the tahini, surprisingly, being the biggest hit!

Making 10 filled pittas, each with four falafel, a ton of salad and all the spreads, the £35 Yossi Foods meal box, I’d say, is pretty damn good value for money. I love the fact that the falafel and pittas come pre-frozen and that they’re easy to reheat in the quantities required, as it means no wastage. I may have won this one in a competition, but I’ll definitely be placing an order with them when the contents of this box have been finished!

Visit their website to order!