Sweet Earth makes some great vegetarian products, though we haven’t really sampled any of the company’s offerings for a while. We’d tried pretty much everything they had to offer quite a while back, and we were starting to think we wouldn’t ever find a new Sweet Earth frozen food to review. Thankfully, we recently stumbled upon the Sweet Earth La Mancha Empanada and our interest in the company was renewed.
This is a small frozen meal, and it will only take about two minutes of your time to heat up. Simply tear open the package, place the empanada on a paper towel, then pop it into the microwave for 90 seconds. Well, according to the package, anyway. Ours came out kind of lukewarm in the middle, so we stuck it in for an additional 30 seconds.
Out came a toasty little vegetarian-friendly treat.
We were a little nervous about how the crust would turn out in the microwave, but there’s a nice glaze on it that prevents it from getting soggy while creating an interesting texture.
Unfortunately, we’re less enthused about the filling. It has a lovely sundried tomato smell to it, but somehow that does not translate to flavor at all here. We found this filling to taste especially bland. There’s a blend of white beans, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, bell peppers, and goat cheese, but none of these things provides any real flavor. This needed just one thing — maybe some tomatoes or cheddar cheese or even a sriracha sauce — to give it some oomf, and everything else would have fallen into place. As is, it’s really bland.
As a part of Sweet Earth’s Mini Meals line, this is a very small portion of food, so we still felt hungry after eating it. We were hoping it would have been a little more filling.
This has quite a few calories for its size, at 310 (160 from fat), but at least it’s very low in sodium. 200 mg is one of the lowest amounts of sodium we’ve ever seen in a frozen food.
We wanted to like the Sweet Earth La Mancha Empanada, but it feels like it’s missing something. If Sweet Earth could figure out what that is and then make some minor tweaks, this could be an incredible meal. As is, though, we suggest you stick with Sweet Earth’s delicious burritos and their Farmstand line of breakfast sandwiches.
To learn more about the nutrition facts or ingredients in this Sweet Earth frozen empanada, check out our package scan below. We did struggle with the packaging a bit, so we apologize for the poor image quality. (The missing piece of the Nutrition Facts is supposed to say Total Carbs – 31g.)
