Chicken parmesan is a classic comfort food, and you’ll find no shortage of it in your frozen food aisle. We do enjoy a good chicken parm now and again, so we were curious about how Smart Ones’ Chicken Parmesan stacks against its competition.
As a Weight Watchers product, this meal has a SmartPoints value printed right on the side of the box. This chicken parmesan dish is worth 8 SmartPoints. For non-Weight Watcher dieters, there’s only 280 calories in this dish, which certainly isn’t bad.
This meal has an oddly long cook time. The microwave instructions ask you to keep it in fo five to six minutes, stir, then put it back in for one and a half to three minutes. That’s between six and a half and nine minutes, depending on the wattage of your microwave. This is no skimpy cook time. We followed the shorter version of these instructions and still felt the cook time might have been a bit too much — this seemed more than ready to eat when we pulled it out to stir it, and after the second cook duration this came out hotter than the atmosphere of Venus (well, not literally).
Once this meal cooled down enough that it was okay to take a bite, we realized that the chicken has a very weird consistency. It tastes okay, but it’s kind of rubbery. It’s also too juicy — now, a little juicy is okay, but this chicken seems like it was soaked in something. It’s dripping with moisture, which is just too juicy for us.
We also wish there were more sauce. There’s not enough to fully cover the chicken and leave enough left over for the pasta. That pasta, by the way, is a basic spaghetti noodle. These noodles are a little starchy, and they’re also way too soggy for our taste. There’s also a mozzarella cheese blend over the top of all this, but it’s barely worth mentioning since there’s so little of it.
Smart Ones’ Chicken Parmesan is a pretty mediocre frozen meal. We found Lean Cuisine’s take on this meal to be better than this one, and we found Lean Cuisine’s Parmesan Crusted Fish to be even better than that. And, if you’re willing to stray even further away from the chicken portion of this dish, Trader Joe’s has a wonderful Stacked Eggplant Parmesan that you should definitely try. As for the Smart Ones version of this meal, you can probably skip it. There are much better parm dishes on the market.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition info or ingredients in this frozen chicken parmesan dish, check out our package scans below.