Oh why, Lean Cuisine, must you break our hearts over and over again?
We’ve tried quite a bit of Lean Cuisine’s Mexican-inspired frozen food — from the Cheese & Bean Enchilada Verde to the Fiesta Grilled Chicken — and we still haven’t found anything we’d recommend to a friend. We hoped the Chile Lime Chicken might change that. But while it’s better than many of the other dishes we’ve tried, it still doesn’t manage to rise above mediocrity.
The true saving grace of this meal is that the sauce is actually quite good. It’s a tomato-based sauce that has a little bit of sweetness to it. It’s almost like Lean Cuisine’s pasta sauce, in fact, but not quite.
The chicken is halfway decent as well. It’s nothing that will send you shouting about its greatness on the mountaintops or anything, but it has a decent texture and it’s nice and juicy. Flavor? Not so much, but that’s not always a bad thing. It was clearly designed to soak up the sauce. We did hope we’d be able to taste a bit of lime in this, as the box suggests, but we didn’t notice any.
There’s quite a bit of corn mixed in, and while it’s a bit wrinkly and dehydrated, it still has some nice flavor.
The rice is where the problems get serious. It’s dry and starchy, and it tastes pretty bad when eaten on its own. Like the chicken, it was intended to be mixed into the sauce, and it’s much better after you stir everything together. The big problem, though, is that you’re going to run out of sauce pretty quickly, so there will be dry, starchy rice stuck around the edges of the dish no matter what you do.
Lean Cuisine’s Chile Lime Chicken is just alright. They have worse Mexican frozen food, but there are other brands that are doing this sort of this much better than they are. Healthy Choice has a decent burrito bowl in their lineup, and if you don’t mind the calories, Devour makes an absolutely killer pulled chicken version. We just can’t think of any compelling reason to choose Lean Cuisine over their competitors on this one.
If you’re curious about the nutrition content or ingredients, check out our package scans below.
