Freezer Meal Frenzy started out with frozen burritos, so there was a time when we mostly knew Evol for their burritos. However, over the years, we became more and more familiar with the meals the brand makes outside of their tortilla-wrapped tentpole product line. And we have to be honest, they do some pretty weird stuff (pizza with chicken for crust, what?)
Today, we’re checking out something that’s less weird than Evol’s chicken-crust pizza, the Evol Paleo Friendly Unwrapped Chicken Egg Roll Bowl. We’ve been enjoying egg rolls a lot lately, so we’re pretty excited to check out this “unwrapped” version.
Cooking this is pretty simple. Slit open the plastic covering, pop the bowl into the microwave for three minutes, give it a quick stir, then pop it back in for one or two minutes more. We only needed one minute in that last step, brining our total cook time to four minutes. (To read the full cooking instructions off the back of the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
First off, let’s unwrap this chicken. This stuff is really good. It’s moist (though there’s a slightly chalky consistency buried in there somewhere), and it has a nice flavor. While some frozen food products skimp on the chicken (Evol is not always innocent), this particular meal has a pretty fair portion.
For some veggie goodness, you’ve got carrots and shaved Brussels sprout. The carrots don’t have a ton of flavor, but they do retain some of their crunch in this meal, so they’re more about texture than flavor, we think. The Brussels sprouts, on the other hand, are pretty potent, though they have a bitter, earthy aftertaste that lingers perhaps a bit too long.
This all sits atop a bed of riced cauliflower, which is perfect flavor-wise, but it means the consistency is going to be a bit soggier than your average rice or quinoa.
What makes all of this work is the sauce. This is a sweet and sour-style infusion sauce, which has a little bit of a vinegar flavor to it. We really enjoy the sauce here, though we do think it becomes a little too rich as you continue to eat. That vinegar flavor comes to the surface and feels more and more potent with each consecutive bite.
This meal contains 280 calories, which isn’t bad at all for a frozen meal. In fact, we’d file this in the diet-friendly category. However, the sodium is kind of intense, with 1,030 mg of sodium packed into this little meal. If you’re trying to avoid sodium, this meal is a no-no.
The Evol Paleo Friendly Unwrapped Egg Roll Bowl is a decent-tasting meal that wears out its welcome by the end. While the initial bites are very good, the aftertaste of the Brussels sprouts and the compounding of the vinegar flavor overtake everything else. Even so, it’s not a bad meal, but note that your first bite will probably be the best, and it’s all downhill from there.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.