We’ve tried El Monterey’s Bean & Cheese Burritos before, though they were the small ones that come in an eight-pack. We wanted to return to the flavor, however, to see what the XX Large Bean & Cheese Burrito has to offer. For the most part, this is the same thing that comes in the eight-pack, only here it’s offered in a much, much larger size.
The last time we tried these, we used the microwave to cook them, which ended up causing the shell to get soggy and sticky. To avoid that this time around, we decided to heat this up in the oven. We thawed the burrito in the fridge overnight first, which reduces the cook time later on. If you thaw yours like we did, you can simply preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit, then cook the burrito — which should be wrapped in aluminum foil at this point — for about 20 minutes. Easy.
This is no small burrito. When we set it on our plate, it just sat there looking like a fat, limp mummy sandworm.
We were really let down by this shell. We hoped that by using the oven, we could mitigate that damp, sticky feel that it gets in the microwave. Unfortunately, the oven didn’t do this burrito any favors. This is a very low-quality shell. It’s also wrapped several layers thick, so it takes up about half the thickness of the burrito.
The filling isn’t any better. It’s a sickly colored mash of refried beans that has very little flavor. We did find the occasional full bean, which was dry and crusty.
Here, the gigantic size becomes a negative rather than a positive; we ended up tossing about half of this after choking down as much as we could stomach.
Of course, if you’re looking for nothing more than a burrito that will put some meat on your bones, this might be a halfway decent option. At 560 calories (140 from fat), this is definitely one of the fattier burritos we’ve tried. This also has a good deal of sodium in it — 720 mg. Be careful with this one, folks!
The El Monterey XX Large Bean & Cheese Burrito is simply a mess. We have almost nothing positive to say about this besides pointing out that it’s affordable, especially when it’s on sale. Unfortunately, it also looks cheap, and even worse, it tastes cheap. If you can afford the slight price difference, we recommend Evol’s Sriracha Chicken Big Burrito instead. That’s a quality burrito that El Monterey should study — they could stand to learn a few things about tasty frozen burritos.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen burrito, check out our package scans below.
