Our romance with the Healthy Choice brand of frozen food was a short one that ended in betrayal. While we enjoyed some of the first Healthy Choice meals we reviewed, we soon grew complacent about their mediocre offerings. Eventually, we delved into their Power Bowls and almost destroyed our microwave in the process. No, we’re not exaggerating. You have to see the pictures to believe it.
So at one point, we swore off the brand entirely. “Never again,” we said with resolve in our voices and fire in our eyes, “shall Healthy Choice food touch our lips.” However, we’re breaking our oath today, as we’re checking out the Healthy Choice Mexican-Style Street Corn. We were seduced by the prospect of eating a bowl of tasty-yet-light street corn.
The Healthy Choice Café Steamers meals have slightly different cooking instructions than your average frozen meal. See, these come with a strainer that keeps the main portion of the meal separate from the sauce while heating. We’ve talked about this at least a dozen times before, so we won’t bore our longtime readers to tears by explaining it yet again. (If you want to know more, check out some of our older Healthy Choice reviews.)
Oh, and in case you’re wondering: This meal did not burst into flames in our microwave (which is a thing that actually happens with some of the Healthy Choice Power Bowls — Café Steamers don’t seem to have this problem, though).
This is by no means a complex dish. It’s just a blend of chicken, red bell peppers, black beans, and corn, all soaked in a lime sauce and covered in cotija cheese.
The chicken is slightly below average for a frozen food. It tastes decent, but it’s rubbery and gristly, making it less satisfying to chew than we’d like. The veggies are mostly fine, but the corn really stands out as the flavor champion of this meal. It’s not amazing, but it’s the best part of this meal without question.
The lime sauce is a good choice here, but the cheese is pretty awful. We typically love cotija cheese in Mexican-inspired meals, but this stuff smells like crayons. That crayon smell lingers with every bite, and it’s really hard to shake even after the dish has been eaten. We’re not sure what went wrong here, but something clearly ain’t right.
As the Healthy Choice brand name implies, this is a diet-friendly meal, clocking in at only 240 calories. This also contains 510 mg of sodium, which is actually low for a frozen meal (though it’s still a bit high for those trying to reduce their sodium intake). Of course, the portion size here is pretty small.
The Healthy Choice Mexican-Style Street Corn is a terrible way to get your corn fix. The corn portion is fine, but this whole meal smells like crayons. There are much better street-corn products on the market today (such as the Trader Joe’s Mexican Style Roasted Corn with Cotija Cheese), so there’s really no need to settle for this one.
To read more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Healthy Choice frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
