We’ve been trying to get over our tragic past with Healthy Choice frozen food. If you don’t know the story, we attempted to review a Healthy Choice Power Bowl that caused a fire in our microwave, and after that, we put the brand on timeout for a good long while.
But we’ve been trying to come back around. Healthy Choice is still putting out new frozen foods, and our readers are curious to know more about these new meals. So our obligations have brought us back to Healthy Choice. The good news is that, so far, there have been no additional fires.
The Healthy Choice Pineapple Chicken bowl caught our eye because it seemed like a meal that Healthy Choice could potentially get right. So today, we’re going to dig in and see what it’s all about.
If you’ve never eaten one of Healthy Choice’s Café Steamers, you might be surprised to find that there’s a plastic colander built into the bowl that keeps the bulk of the meal separated from the sauce. We assume this is designed to prevent the meal from getting soggy while it cooks.
Once you finish heating this, you’ll want to dump the colander of goods into the bowl of sauce below and give it a good stir.
We should warn you right away that this comes out of the microwave smelling completely awful. The odor has an obnoxiously persistent sweetness to it. This is likely from the heavily pineapple-based sauce, but it also has a chemical smell to it. It’s not appealing.
This ends up tasting better than it smells, thank goodness, but it’s still not great. The sauce is really, really bad. It has a sweet pineapple flavor, which is great, but there are tones of burnt plastic lingering beneath the surface. We’re not sure what that’s all about, but we don’t like it at all.
The chicken here actually turns out pretty good. It’s a white-meat chicken that doesn’t have a lot of natural flavor, but the pineapple sauce actually does it some justice. The chicken seems to absorb the pineapple side of the flavor profile without taking on the burnt-plastic undertones. The chicken also has a great softness to it — it’s not soggy, but it’s soft enough that it’s pleasant to bite into.
The veggie combo is an appealing one, with edamame, water chestnuts, and red peppers. And, of course, there are pineapple chunks thrown into the mix as well. This would have been a great veggie (and pineapple) blend if it weren’t for that atrocious sauce. This sauce ruins everything it touches (except for, by some miracle, the chicken).
At least this is a low-calorie option. With just 290 calories, you won’t have to feel guilty for eating this. At least this terrible flavor doesn’t also come with a boatload of calories.
The Healthy Choice Pineapple Chicken bowl is astonishingly bad. We’re not sure how Healthy Choice could ruin a bowl of pineapple chicken this badly, but they somehow managed. We feel bad for the chickens that were needlessly slaughtered to make this meal a reality. Those chickens made an appallingly pointless sacrifice, dear reader, and that is nothing short of tragedy.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
