Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano Review

Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano

Lean Cuisine has an enormous line of frozen food — in fact, Lean Cuisine could stop updating their line and just cruise on their current offerings for quite some time. But they keep pushing out new products regardless. We admire this dedication, since it’s always refreshing to spot something brand new in the freezer aisle.

For example, we were pretty thrilled to discover the Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano during a recent trip to the grocery store. While Lean Cuisine’s offerings are certainly not without their misses, we tend to enjoy their pasta dishes quite a bit. So finding new Lean Cuisine pasta meals is always exciting.

This one is a no-brainer to heat — it simply requires five minutes in the microwave with a quick stir session after the first three and a half minutes. This is a meal that definitely doesn’t require a chef or a great deal of spare time.

Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano

We were admittedly a bit concerned when we first cracked open the package, as the sauce portion is disconcertingly skimpy. Instead of that luscious red noodle-and-chicken feast pictured on the box, this is a pale affair with a tiny little red splotch in one corner. That flaw will sort of work itself out when you stir the noodles, but don’t expect this meal to be loaded with sauce. (In fact, if you look closely at the image on the box, you’ll notice that the chicken pieces have no sauce on them at all!)

So, as you might expect, this is a bit weak on flavor. Instead of a rich pasta treat, this is a sort-of-bland tray of noodles. Don’t get us wrong, the sauce tastes alright — it’s a basic tomato paste with an oniony flavor — but there’s just not enough of it to give this the potency it needs. And that means it’s pretty underwhelming.

The chicken isn’t especially great either. It’s a bit rubbery, it doesn’t have much flavor, and the breading is soggy. We’re pretty confident that all of these issues could have been easily mitigated with a more generous portion of sauce.

This meal contains 360 calories and 650 mg of sodium. Neither of those numbers is cause for alarm, as those are pretty average for frozen food. The sodium is a tad high for a regular meal, but slightly under average for a frozen dinner.

The Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano is a fairly mediocre pasta dish that’s too stingy on sauce for its own good. A larger sauce portion could have covered some of the flaws, but with such a skimpy amount the low-quality chicken bits and bland spiral noodles end up dominating the flavor profile. We were actually pretty excited to try this, but now that we’ve tasted it for ourselves we can safely say it’s a skippable frozen meal that should have been so much better.

To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Lean Cuisine frozen pasta, check out our package scans below.

Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano
Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano
Lean Cuisine Panko Crusted Chicken Romano
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