Ah, our old friend Chicken Bacon Ranch (or CBR, as we like to call ’em). It’s truly a classic combo, and it’s one that Stouffer’s in making good use of with the Stouffer’s Cheesy Chicken Bacon Ranch Meal for 2.
The package gives you two options for cooking this frozen meal. If you decide to use the microwave, you’re looking at 11 minutes of cook time. If you’re like us, however, and decide to use the oven (which is the recommended method), you’re going to spend more than an hour waiting for this to cook. We had some time on our hands, so we didn’t mind the wait, but this is certainly not something for people in a hurry. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
After all that cooking, you’ll pull out the tasty-looking meal pictured below:
The chicken comes in large strips of white meat with grilled stripes on the sides. And it’s pretty decent. It’s certainly not the best chicken we’ve ever had, but this stuff actually has more flavor than we’d expect from a white-meat chicken in a frozen meal. Plus, it’s juicy in the middle. It does get a little dry on the outside, though, which is our only complaint.
There’s shell pasta buried in this dish, though we were actually surprised by how large the chicken portion is compared to the pasta. We were expecting mostly pasta with a few pieces of chicken mixed in, but the chicken really does stand out as a major part of this meal. This is a good thing, for sure.
We’re told there is bacon in here somewhere, but it’s barely even noticeable. It’s ground into tiny pieces that you’ll find if you really look hard, but otherwise it’s mostly just there to account for the B in CBR.
This even has some broccoli in it. It’s more of a garnish than anything else (the color palette really needed some green in it), but the stuff that’s here is actually pretty good. It tastes relatively fresh, and it’s not soggy (which is a major problem with a lot of frozen broccoli).
It’s the sauce, though, that really sells this for us. This is a creamy affair that’s loaded up with garlic, and it adds a shine to every other component in this dish.
And yes, there’s some cheese in here, though we don’t think there’s quite enough to earn the word cheesy in the title of this meal. It starts out as a lovely topper for the dish, but when you stir the pasta, it gets mixed in and sort of slinks into the shadows. However, the monterey-jack-and-cheddar combo really balances out the sour cream portion of the sauce, bringing the whole dish together.
This is advertised as a meal for two. Unlike many of the other dishes out there that make this same claim, this one actually delivers. The image a few paragraphs up shows what half the tray looks like in a serving dish. That’s a full meal, right?
Unfortunately, this also comes packed with calories. At 550 calories (210 from fat), this isn’t going to go over well with dieters. The sodium level is really high too, at 1,100 mg per serving. Yikes!
The Stouffer’s Cheesy Chicken Bacon Ranch is very good, and it’s definitely enough food for two people. While the chicken isn’t perfect, it’s still better than a lot of the competitors’ offerings. The rest of the meal, however, is perfection (as long as you aren’t expecting a bacon-loaded treat). We really like this, and we definitely hope to return to it very soon — we’ll just have to be careful about counting our calories to make up for it!
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Stouffer’s frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
Love the baked chicken and potatoes, but it could use a little more gravy