Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables Review

Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables

If you’re looking for a low-calorie meal that doesn’t sacrifice flavor, Smart Made has a pretty good selection of lightweight frozen meals that meet these criteria. The Turkey Sausage & Roasted Vegetable Bake and the Chicken with Spinach Fettuccine have both proven to be good options. So when we found the Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables at the freezer aisle of our local grocery store, we expected yet another low-calorie winner.

Unfortunately, this comes out of the microwave smelling like burnt plastic. It tastes better than it smells, but it’s also not the best meal in the Smart Made line.

The main event here is the beef strips. There are pieces in the mix that are juicy, but then there are others that are dry and even a little chalky. There’s also not as much beef in this meal as we were hoping for. The saving grace for the beef is the pepper glaze, which tastes amazing and has a sweet zing to it thanks to the addition of honey. Any beef strip soaked in the stuff will really shine.

Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables

We to love dishes with zucchini in them when the zucchini portion is done well. Here, that’s not the case. This zucchini has a weird, artificial taste. In fact, when we mentioned that the dish smells like burnt plastic, it was the zucchini that we were smelling. It’s unfortunate, because some better zucchini would have really made this dish sing.

There are some onions and some roasted red peppers in the mix as well, but they also suffer from a bit of the “burnt plastic” problem. They’re not as potent as the zucchini, but they’re not great either. There’s a lot of veggies in this bowl, so this is a pretty big problem.We’re not sure what went wrong here, but some better veggies would have turned this from a mediocre frozen meal to a pretty good one.

At just 260 calories (45 from fat), this frozen food is in the diet-friendly range. It’s also got 620 mg of sodium, which isn’t bad for a frozen food (though it’s a bit high in general).

The Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables has too many flaws for us to feel comfortable recommending it. Some higher-quality vegetables would have gone a long way in making this an appetizing, low-calorie frozen food. As is, we think it’s probably okay to skip this one for some of Smart Made’s better meals, or, better yet, a Frontera bowl.

To learn more about the ingredients and nutrition content of this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.

Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables

Smart Made Grilled Peppercorn Beef & Vegetables

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