Jimmy Dean has a pretty expansive selection of frozen breakfast foods. They’re probably best known for their sandwiches, but they also serve up breakfast meats and some really creative takes on a.m. eating.
The Jimmy Dean Sausage, Egg & Cheese Casserole Bites are in that later category — they’re one of those odd little breakfast items that piqued our curiosity. So today we’re going to check them out.
First of all, these must be cooked. There are microwave instructions and oven instructions, but we decided to go with the oven for these. We were going to use the microwave at first, but then we started thinking about soggy eggs, and we decided that we should maybe bake these in the oven. If you want to see the full cooking instructions for both the microwave and the oven, you can check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.
We have to say that the oven was a good choice for these. Even in the oven, the insides are a little bit watery, but the outsides get a nice dryness to them that makes the whole thing work. If an entire casserole bite was squishy and watery, it would be kind of off-putting. As is, the consistency is halfway decent. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s alright.
The sausage actually does a lot of the heavy lifting, flavor-wise, and that’s a good thing. Jimmy Dean does make a pretty good breakfast sausage, with a meaty flavor and just a little bit of spice to it, so it’s a good choice for the core flavor in these casserole bites.
However, the egg portion is kind of bland, and the cheese portion doesn’t do enough to offset these. In fact, they taste like they need a little something extra, perhaps a hot sauce, to complete the flavor profile. As is, they’re just not that appealing.
According to the package, five casserole bites is a serving. There should be about three servings in a bag, though our bag only had 13 (and really, two of them merged into a super-bite that was about the size of a bite and a half, so you could argue that there were only twelve or twelve and a half here). While you could eat the whole package in a sitting, we don’t think you will unless you find a really good dipping sauce.
If you stick with the recommended serving size, you’re looking at 190 calories and 580 mg of sodium. If you eat double that, that becomes 380 calories and 1,160 mg of sodium, which is a little high but still not bad. For the record, our reviewer ate nine and complained about feeling overly full. So there you go.
The Jimmy Dean Sausage, Egg & Cheese Casserole Bites might catch your eye, but they’re a little lacking in the flavor department. They’re not horrible, they just feel like they need a little something extra, though we’re struggling to think of what that might be. We mentioned hot sauce earlier, but even a side of fried onions and peppers might actually complement these well enough to elevate the quality a bit. As is, they’re a little on the weak side.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen casserole bites, check out our package scans below.
