Lean Cuisine has added many new options to their frozen meal selections, including Lean Cuisine High Protein Bowls. We are curious about everything food, so a couple of us decided to buy the new Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Buffalo-Style Mac & Cheese and Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes.
We are here to share our honest thoughts and experience with these new bowls, and show you some real-life pictures that may surprise you, so let’s get to it!
Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Buffalo-Style Mac & Cheese Review
The Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Buffalo-Style Mac & Cheese Bowl is made up of breaded white-meat chicken with pasta in a cheesy buffalo-style sauce. It is advertised as having a great taste with half of the fat of similar frozen meals with only 340 calories and 22 grams of protein.
We cooked our bowls according to the instructions on the box, and this is what the we got out of the microwave.
It’s not that too different from the image on the box, and it smells nice and spicy. and then it There is a nice kick of buffalo sauce that makes the dish surprisingly flavorful for a frozen dinner. The oven fried chicken bites are decent but a little soggy. Our initial impressions of this meal were positive, and we couldn’t wait to try the mac and cheese.
Most of our reviewers like Lean Cuisine’s mac & cheese varieties, especially the Vermont white cheddar one. We will sometimes eat it even when we aren’t necessarily trying to eat healthy. We expected the mac and cheese in this bowl to at least be comparable in taste and texture to the other Lean Cuisine meals. However, that is where things started to go wrong for us.
The noodles in the Buffalo-Style Mac & Cheese are very mushy when cooked following the package instructions, and there isn’t much cheese flavor. Even after topping it with extra grated cheese, we found it difficult to finish the whole bowl, mostly due to the texture. The general consensus is that it is “mushy and not cheesy”.
Summary And Rating
The Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Buffalo-Style Mac & Cheese had a surprising amount of buffalo flavor, but a rather mushy texture.
Pros
- Nice amount of buffalo flavor
- Chicken has good flavor
- 22 grams of protein is filling
Cons
- Soggy chicken breading
- Mushy texture
- Not much cheese flavor.
Rating: 4.5/10
There is a lot potential here, especially if you enjoy Buffalo flavor and don’t mind mushy pasta. It’s not our favorite, but we may try it again by partially heating the chicken separate from the macaroni so the noodles don’t cook as long.
Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes Review
The product description for the Oven Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes led our reviewers to think of this one as “a diet-friendly” version of a KFC Famous Bowl. It consists of breaded white-meat chicken with creamy mashed potato, savory gravy, and sweet corn. This is also advertised as having a great taste with half of the fat of similar frozen meals. It has only 290 calories with 14 grams of protein. The resemblance between the two unfortunately ends with the description though.
Here is what ours looked like when it came out of the microwave.
While they do share many of the same ingredients, the chicken is merely decent and slightly bland and soggy in this Lean Cuisine bowl. The gravy in this meal is also merely okay, but it was described by one reviewer as having a “slightly oily mouth feel”.
We were hoping that the mashed potatoes might save the day, but they proved to be generic bland, frozen mashed potatoes. Our apologies to Lean Cuisine, because we wanted to enjoy this one, but none of us did. The new Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes bowl is a great concept for a frozen meal, yet we found it largely underwhelming and poorly executed. We all agree that the best part of this meal is the corn. Frozen corn is rather standard and hard to mess up though.
Summary and Review
This is a great idea for a bowl, but needs a lot of tweaking to be successful with our crew.
Pros
- Fresh, sweet corn
- A healthy take on comfort food
Cons
- Chicken is a bit bland and soggy
- Gravy is oily
- Mashed potatoes are watery and need seasoning
Rating: 3.25/10
Have you tried the Lean Cuisine Oven Fried Chicken with Buffalo-Style Mac & Cheese bowl or the Oven Fried Chicken with Mashed Potatoes bowl? You can share your thoughts on these products in the comments section below.
