If you’ve never heard of the Lunds & Byerlys brand, we can’t really fault you. L&B is an upscale chain of grocery stores exclusive to Minneapolis, MN, and the surrounding area. Unless you live near Minnesota’s famous Twin Cities, there’s no reason you should be familiar with this chain.
That said, the Freezer Meal Frenzy office is in Minneapolis, which gives us easy access to all of the foods offered by Lunds & Byerlys. And believe us when we say that they have a substantial frozen food line. Their frozen soups alone take up a full section of their freezer aisle.
We’ve tried a few of their soups before, and today we’re digging deeper into this expansive line. We’re checking out the Lunds & Byerlys Meatball Sub Chef-Crafted Soup, which is an incredibly intriguing flavor combo.
Heating this is pretty simple. Just slit open the bag, pop it into the microwave for a couple minutes so it can thaw, then dump it into a bowl and microwave it some more. You can also cook it on the stovetop, which is pretty easy too, but we stuck with the ol’ microwave on this one. (If you want to read the full, detailed cooking instructions, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
The base here is a tomato broth that’s filled with garlic, onions, and Italian-style seasoning. It doesn’t taste like a creamy tomato soup; this is more designed to taste like a pasta sauce (though runny and souplike). It succeeds, for the most part. It’s quite tasty and seasoned well. You’ll also find some parmesan cheese here to really drive home that meatball sub flavor.
As the title suggests, this contains meatballs. And these aren’t just boring old hunks of beef; these are rich, spicy Italian meatballs, loaded with flavor and exciting to eat. This is where the soup really excels; the meat is fantastic. A bland meat would have really killed this thing, but the folks at Lunds & Byerlys clearly know what they’re doing. (We’ve tried their sausage pizza, so we knew they were capable of pulling this off.)
The whole time we were eating this, we were thinking about how good it would have been to have had some Italian bread to dip in this soup. That would have made a great combo, and we’re a little bummed we didn’t think to try it earlier.
Calorie-counters rejoice, this is a pretty low-cal meal. With just 210 calories, this certainly won’t throw off any diets. The bad news, however, is that the sodium level is through the roof — 1,270 mg of sodium is nothing to scoff at. Even worse, this is hardly filling at all. You can see in the image a few paragraphs up that this isn’t a huge amount of food, and it will probably leave you hungry if you try to make a meal of it.
The Lunds & Byerlys Meatball Sub Chef-Crafted Soup is a great-tasting, low-calorie bowl of soup, but it’s not very filling. Of course, if you add a side of Italian bread for dipping, you might be able to make this into an actual meal.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen soup, check out our package scan below.
