Jimmy Dean is a brand that makes frozen breakfast foods. We think most people probably know them for their breakfast sandwiches, but they’ve got a whole bunch of other breakfast items up their sleeves too (no, not their literal sleeves).
One of the non-sandwich categories of food that Jimmy Dean produces is the Breakfast Bowls line. We’ve tried a few of these already (including the Steak & Eggs Breakfast Bowl and the Bacon Breakfast Bowl). Today, however, we’re checking out the Jimmy Dean Biscuit & Sausage Gravy Breakfast Bowl. This frozen meal is not to be confused with the Sausage & Gravy Breakfast Bowl — the packaging looks disorientingly similar, and the titles are pretty close as well. However, the meal we’re trying today does something completely different than it’s deceptively similar-looking cousin.
According to the box, this meal should only take about three minutes to heat in the microwave. We were a bit suspicious about this, but we tried it nonetheless. After the first microwave session (two minutes), the gravy was still mostly frozen. However, the last minute almost did the trick (we ended up giving it an extra 30 seconds because it still wasn’t hot all the way through). We do recommend giving this just a little bit of extra time to make sure it’s heated properly. (If you want to read the cooking instructions directly from the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this article.)
Now, this is a pretty simple dish. All there is to it is a dish filled with gravy that has a biscuit in the center and bits of sausage around the edges. There’s nothing complicated about this breakfast.
The sausage is absolutely fantastic. While we’ve witnessed Jimmy Dean’s skill at producing great-tasting sausage in the past, this stuff still came as a surprise to us. We’re not sure if we were just feeling extra hungry on this particular morning, but the sausage here was really satisfying. The portion size is pretty generous too — we had at least a dozen balls of sausage in our gravy (it’s probably hard to tell from the image above, but the dish is actually deeper than it looks from that particular angle, and there was a good amount of sausage hiding beneath the surface of the gravy).
The gravy also tastes great. It’s a cream sauce that has a chicken-broth sort of flavor to it (though we’re not sure where that comes from because we don’t see chicken broth as an ingredient). It is runnier than we’d have liked, which becomes a problem when you consider that this stuff was designed to top a biscuit. Now, the gravy does thicken up a little bit as this cools, so you could potentially heat this a bit longer (maybe an extra minute instead of the extra 30 seconds that we gave it), and then let it cool for about five minutes before digging in. This might actually take care of the runniness.
Like the gravy, the biscuit actually has a great flavor, but the consistency feels off to us. This biscuit tends to be soggy on the outside and rubbery on the inside, which isn’t ideal for a breakfast biscuit. The soggy outside is probably inevitable due to the gravy it’s soaked in, but we were hoping for a drier, more biscuit-y inner portion.
This is certainly not the most lightweight of breakfast options, with 460 calories (240 from fat) and 880 mg of sodium. This isn’t a breakfast designed for dieters, and it’s not even very filling. If you’re a fan of hearty breakfasts, this ends up feeling pretty lightweight, even with the generous sausage portion.
The Jimmy Dean Biscuit & Sausage Gravy Breakfast Bowl tastes great, but it has some consistency issues. It’s really hard to do a biscuit justice in a frozen meal, and especially so when that biscuit is soaked in gravy — we get that. Still, a drier, more powdery biscuit and a thicker sauce would have really made this breakfast a champion. As is, we think it’s worth trying if you can forgive it for its flaws.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen breakfast bowl, check out our package scans below.
