Not only does Freezer Meal Frenzy have a long history of reviewing frozen burritos, but our staffers have a long history of eating El Monterey products. So you can imagine our surprise when we stumbled upon the El Monterey Bean, Three-Cheese & Jalapeño Burrito, which we’d somehow never heard of before. Sure, this isn’t one of El Monterey’s tentpole products (like the Bean & Cheese Burritos or the Beef & Bean Burritos), but still, we thought we’d done a pretty thorough job of reviewing this line.
Is it possible these are brand-new? Well, Walmart’s product listing has customer reviews dating back to 2014, so no, this isn’t a new product; we’d just never noticed it before. And that’s a wrong that we’re going to right today, as we’re finally going to smoosh the El Monterey Bean, Three-Cheese & Jalapeño Burrito into our hungry mouths and see what it tastes like.
This is easy to heat up. Simply open up one end of the package and pop this whole thing into the microwave for a minute and 50 seconds. Easy peasy. You can try the oven if you’d like, but it takes 40 minutes and we’ve never found the extra cook time to be worth it for El Monterey burritos. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the plastic, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Our burrito certainly didn’t come out looking pretty, and things weren’t made any better by cutting this in half.
However, we should point out that the reason this is so sloppy is that it’s perhaps the cheesiest burrito in the El Monterey line. In fact, the filling here is mostly cheese, making this more similar to the Red’s Cheese Quesadilla Burrito than any of El Monterey’s other offerings (which are usually mostly filled with beans). This is stretchy, gooey Monterey jack and cheddar, and it’s better than expected.
The rest of the burrito, however, is a little lacking. There’s a bit of refried bean gloop here, though it’s not particularly good. The cheese overload is clearly designed to hide this fact. This is also a little bit spicy, but we really won’t rate it above a medium-mild. If you’re looking for something to really spice up your lunch, this probably isn’t it. (If you want something spicier from El Monterey, you might want to check out their Kickin’ Queso Potato, Beef & Queso Flavored Burritos.)
We’re pretty sure you weren’t expecting us to talk about how diet-friendly this is, so it probably won’t come as a huge surprise that this contains 330 calories and 430 mg of sodium. While neither of those numbers is bad on its own, you’ll definitely want to eat two of these if you’re making this a meal. This thing is really small, perhaps on par with a Taco Bell basic taco. Those numbers look a lot less attractive now, don’t they?
The El Monterey Bean, Three-Cheese & Jalapeño Burrito is good if you love cheesy burritos. However, it’s not very spicy, the bean portion is scant, and it has more calories than we’d like to see in a burrito this small (and flat — this burrito is surprisingly flat). While we can definitely see this as a guilty pleasure burrito, we don’t think we’ll return to this often.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen burrito, check out our package scans below.
