Lean Cuisine Steak Portabella Review

Lean Cuisine’s Steak Portabella is a frozen meal that’s actually very lean, as the Lean Cuisine brand name would imply. At only 180 calories (and 30 from fat), this is not a meal that will put meat on your bones. It seems custom-tailored for the dieting carnivore crowd.

To satisfy fans of Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine has stamped the SmartPoints value of this meal right on the side of the box. This meal is worth 4 SmartPoints, which is quite low.

Now, Lean Cuisine makes sure they let you know that they in no way endorse the Weight Watchers program, even though they’re using the SmartPoints system. We find it a bit hilarious that Lean Cuisine wants to market a meal on the back of Weight Watchers, but they can’t commit to even saying a single positive thing about the program. It’s the sort of double standard that can only come from a corporation like the demonic cabal that is Nestlé.

But we’ll save our rants about Nestlé for another day — we actually do like many of Lean Cuisine’s frozen food products. So let’s dive into this review of Lean Cuisine’s Steak Portabella.

We really do love portabella mushrooms here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, so we had high hopes for a frozen food that has the word portabella right there in the title. Unfortunately, we really had to dig to find any of the stuff, and the few pieces we did find were tiny and rubbery. These are some of the worst portabella mushrooms we’ve ever had.

The main event here, of course, is the steak. The meat is a little inconsistent, as we did find some tough, gristly pieces, but for the most part it does the job. We’d say it has more of a roast beef flavor than a steak flavor though. Yes, we’re aware that steak and beef come from the same animal, but there’s a reason there are different terms to describe this meat — they are indeed different things, and they do typically have slightly different flavors.

The steak and miniscule mushroom portion come drenched in a savory sauce. It does mitigate the lack of mushrooms a little bit as it does have a bit of a portabella flavor. It complements the steak quite well.

Now, we have to be honest. This meal is about 50% broccoli, which explains its low calorie count. A large slab of steak would be much higher in calories than a few diced pieces of meat surrounded by broccoli — the latter of which describes this meal much more accurately than the former. This won’t disappoint fans of broccoli, but anyone wanting a thick, juicy steak is probably going to be a little bummed out.

The broccoli tastes pretty good, though it kind of gets everywhere. We found it in our steak sauce, as well as around the edges of the tray. This is a vegetable with an escape plan!

If you can’t get enough broccoli, Lean Cuisine’s Steak Portabella is a treat. However, if you’re looking for steak and portabella mushrooms — as the name of this frozen food would suggest — you’re probably not going to be thrilled by this. By the time we were done eating this, we were certainly ready to wash it down with a cold glass of milk and forget all about it.

To learn more about the nutrition content and ingredients in this frozen steak meal, check out our package scans below.