A chicken patty with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy. It’s hard to deny that this is a classic combo. So when we spotted the Stouffer’s Baked Chicken Breast, and we saw that it was this exact combo, we knew we had to give it a try.
Now, in the past, we did review the Classic Baked Chicken, and we were curious to see how much difference there is between these meals. After all, Stouffer’s has quite a huge variety of lasagna dishes, and most of them are just slight variations of the others. We figured these chicken dishes were a similar deal.
When we compared the ingredients on the packages, we found these to be almost exactly the same, with a couple very minor differences. Where the Classic Baked Chicken has “modified rice starch” and “modified food starch,” the Baked Chicken Breast has “modified food starch” and “modified tapioca starch” respectively. It’s a teeny, tiny difference, and it’s not one we expect to change this dish much.
But there’s only one way to find out. We tossed this into the microwave to see how different these two dishes actually are from one another.
The Classic Baked Chicken was not a nice-looking meal, and this one isn’t either. The gravy and mashed potatoes look sickly, and the chicken breast looks like it’s made out of Play-Doh.
And none of this tastes very good either. The chicken has a fishy flavor to it, which really threw us off. This tasted more like low-quality fish than low-quality chicken. The gravy doesn’t help either — it’s a thin, soupy, virtually flavorless mess. The Classic Baked Chicken had at least a little bit of flavor in their gravy, but the Stouffer’s Baked Chicken Breast is just plain bland.
The only part of this meal that we didn’t find to be genuinely bad was the mashed potatoes. These are some very buttery tasting potatoes. While the texture is soggy and grainy, the flavor isn’t half bad. Still, we can’t shake the feeling that these were probably made from a powder rather than straight from a genuine potato.
So how about calories? Well, while the Classic Baked Chicken had 230 calories (70 from fat) and 790 mg of sodium, this one actually has 210 calories (50 from fat) and 740 mg of sodium. If rearranging these starches did any good at all, it let Stouffer’s cut the calories a bit. And we have to admit, 210 calories is pretty diet-friendly.
The Stouffer’s Baked Chicken Breast is a meal we hope to forget as soon as possible. The only part of this we didn’t want to toss straight into the garbage was the mashed potatoes, and even those are barely mediocre. Do yourself a favor and skip this frozen meal if you can.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Stouffer’s frozen food, check out our package scans below.
