Smart Made has some pretty delicious chicken-based meals in their lineup. Their Chicken with Spinach Fettuccine is a must-try for dieters, and their Mexican-Style Chicken Bowl isn’t too shabby. So we’ve been looking forward to trying out the Smart Made Pesto Chicken & Orzo for a while now. The day of reckoning is finally upon us.
So how did we like this frozen food? Well, let’s jump right into our review.
We’ll start with the chicken. These aren’t just small little cutlets of chicken, these are pretty huge pieces for a frozen meal. They aren’t the lovely charbroiled cuts you’ll find in some of Smart Made’s other meals; they’re larger chunks of white meat chicken covered in a crumbly parmesan and pesto sauce. It’s quite juicy, but we didn’t find it to be as flavorful as Smart Made’s other chicken offerings.
The pesto sauce is a bit bland at first but it has a potent aftertaste that sort of overpowers the flavor of everything else in this dish. It begins as a “too little” flavor and works up to a “too much” flavor in no time flat. While some people will surely enjoy this, we found it a bit off-putting.
The orzo almost looks like seeds, perhaps a strange mashup between a sunflower seed and a pumpkin seed. It tastes okay, but the firmness isn’t really what we would have liked. We think if it were just a tad bit softer that it would be much better.
Of course, then there’s the veggie blend. This contains broccoli and zucchini, which are rich and plentiful, as well as red onions and tomatoes, which are barely even there at all. It’s a decent mix, and we’d say the broccoli is probably the true champion here.
We’ve had some very low-calorie meals in the Smart Made line, but this is not one of them. At 350 calories (90 from fat), this isn’t a belly-builder by any means, but it’s certainly nowhere near as lean as the White Wine Chicken & Couscous at 190 or the Roasted Turkey & Vegetables at 240.
The Smart Made Pesto Chicken & Orzo didn’t blow us out of the water. It’s a perfectly fine frozen food, but it has a lot of minor flaws that hold it back from its true potential.
To learn more about the nutrition or ingredients in this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
