Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl Review

Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl

We love it that Lean Cuisine has been getting a bit more experimental with their frozen food lately. While we don’t like all of their experiments, some of them have been quite good.

So today we’re pretty excited to be tasting the Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl. According to the box, this mean little dish contains 22g of protein and 1/2 cup of veggies, and it’s gluten-free to boot. Interested yet?

Cooking this is about as simple as it gets. Pop it into the microwave for three and half minutes, give it a quick stir, then pop it back in for two more minutes. Lean Cuisine certainly makes it easy to enjoy their meals.

As you can probably see in the image below, this comes out a bit soupier than we were hoping it would. It also has a strange, earthy-but-slightly-sweet smell to it, which we’re not sure we’re fans of. This might be a combination of the kale and avocado with the sweet corn, which is admittedly a strange blend.

Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl

It tastes pretty alright, though — it’s a little odd, but it definitely doesn’t taste as weird as it smells.

The chicken is decent. It’s a white meat that has more natural chicken flavor than we were expecting. Plus, it has grill marks on the outside of it, which are a nice touch visually. It is a little bit rubbery, though, which lowers the quality overall.

The bulk of the meal is a blend of brown rice, kale, black beans, sweet corn, and peppers, swimming in an avocado and chicken broth sauce. The sauce lends a consistency to this meal that makes every bite taste virtually the same, despite which veggies happen to be present in that particular bite. The chicken is the only part that really stands out from the crowd. The chicken portion is pretty generous, so that’s probably not the worst thing in the world.

And yes, as we pointed out earlier, it’s a bit more watery than we’d like. We do have to admit that it’s pretty filling, though, which is probably due to how much protein there is here.

But is it spicy? Well, not really. There’s a little bit of zing to it, but we pretty much forgot that it has the word Spicy in the title. We think Lean Cuisine is overselling the spice level here by quite a bit.

This meal contains 320 calories. While that’s just outside of the range of what we’d call low-cal, it’s still within the range of meals you can enjoy while on a diet. The sodium level is where red flags start cropping up. With 790 mg of sodium, this meal is above-average in the sodium department — and frozen meals in general are known for being sodium-heavy. 790 mg is a big ask for anyone who’s trying to reduce their sodium intake. Then again, you’re also avoiding gluten here, so the tradeoff might be worth it for some.

The Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl is a decent meal for protein-packers, though it’s not without its flaws. It’s a bit too watery, and we’re not sure the flavor combo completely works for us. While we felt pretty okay about trying this the one time, we’re not sure we’ll go back to it.

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

Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl
Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl
Lean Cuisine Spicy Baja-Style Chicken Bowl
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