Gochujang, a spicy Korean sauce made from fermented red chili peppers, is a favorite of the Freezer Meal Frenzy staffers. There’s nothing quite like digging into a steaming hot bibimbap bowl that’s doused in this fiery sauce. So far, we haven’t found a frozen meal that fully captures the flavor of gochujang, but we’re always eager to try something new. When we saw that the Lean Cuisine Korean Style Rice & Vegetables Plant Powered Bowl featured a gochujang sauce, we were pretty psyched.
Lean Cuisine meals are all about convenience, and that’s definitely true here. It takes about five minutes to heat up this meal, and the process is pretty stress-free. Cook it for three and a half minutes, give it a good stir, let it heat for another minute and a half, and you’re ready to go! Sometimes, edamame dries out in the microwave, but Lean Cuisine’s instructions left us with ingredients that were perfectly cooked.
We wanted to make sure that our dish was completely covered in gochujang sauce, so we stirred this meal a little longer before we dug in. When we took our first bite, we were surprised that it tasted kind of bland. We stirred even longer, but it didn’t seem to solve the problem. Eventually, once we got deeper into the bowl, we could finally taste the gochujang. We’re not sure if Lean Cuisine didn’t include enough sauce, or if the sauce just really clings to the bottom of the bowl.
Without the gochujang, this meal isn’t that impressive. The ingredients taste fresh, but there’s just not a lot of flavor here. With the gochujang, the dish is substantially better. This isn’t as spicy as the gochujang you can find at Korean restaurants or buy at Asian supermarkets, but it does have more heat than you’d expect from a Lean Cuisine meal. We just wish our dish had more of that fiery flavor.
The Lean Cuisine Korean Style Rice & Vegetables Plant Powered Bowl might be a slight disappointment for gochujang lovers. The meal doesn’t have enough flavor without the sauce, and as hard as we tried, we couldn’t seem to get the sauce to cover everything. Still, the base ingredients are pretty solid, and the bites that did have enough sauce were pretty satisfying. If you’re willing to give this a very thorough stir — or if you don’t mind adding some extra sauce of your own — this is worth a try.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
