Lately we’ve been enjoying Stouffer’s Urban Bistro line of frozen food, with its slightly more experimental takes on classic meals and its stylish electric blue packaging. The Cheddar & Goat Cheese Mac is especially tasty. However, there’s been one meal we’ve been struggling to find for a while now — the Stouffer’s Spiced Chicken & Couscous. We like couscous a lot, so we were really hoping to get to try this at some point.
Thankfully, the folks at Stouffer’s were kind enough to send us one. (Funny enough, we did end up finding this at our local Target just a day or two after Stouffer’s told us they were sending us one, so we’re no longer convinced it’s impossible to find!)
This meal also came with a handy fact sheet, which says this has ten different spices in it, “including cumin, allspice and tumeric — inspired by traditional North African spice blends.” So we were pretty excited to jump into this.
Now, what the fact sheet didn’t mention is that the spice blend also contains cinnamon. This adds a sweetness to all that spice, which really elevates the flavor. It’s not something we would have thought of on our own, but now that we’ve tried it, it definitely seems like an obvious choice. It works very well.
To enhance the sweetness even further, there are raisins and sweet potatoes mixed in. The raisins are a little soggy, but they’re also loaded with flavor — you certainly won’t get one of these raisins into your mouth without realizing it’s there. The sweet potatoes are less rich, but they have a firm texture that we find appealing.
The chicken in a bit iffy. It’s nice and juicy, but it has a hard texture and a bit too much gristle, which really detracts from the flavor. Thankfully, that spice blend is there to cover up these imperfections.
As excited as we were about the couscous, we really don’t have a lot to say about it. That’s mostly because it tends to hang out in the background. That’s not a bad thing — the spice blend really is the main event, so we don’t mind the couscous taking a back seat to let some of the other flavors do their talking. The couscous is just here to bring that soft, slippery consistency as a counterpoint to the hearty sweet potatoes and crunchy almonds.
So is this a spicy meal? Well, we should point out that the title says “Spiced Chicken,” not “Spicy Chicken.” Still, this is a mildly spicy dish. We’d say it’s clear-the-sinuses spicy rather than burn-the-mouth spicy, and we think that’s the right choice for this frozen food.
The calorie count isn’t bad — this dish has 320 calories (60 from fat) — but the sodium is a little high, at 700 mg. That’s really about average for a frozen meal, though keep in mind it’s still a bit high.
The Stouffer’s Spiced Chicken & Couscous is quite good. The spice blend is the rock star here; it elevates absolutely everything it touches. We have our nitpicks, but the spice blend works really hard to make up for those.
Note: The meal we reviewed was provided courtesy of Stouffer’s.
If you’re interested in learning more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
