Deeper, deeper we go into the cold and hallowed halls of the Aldi freezer aisle! We’ve checked out a couple different items now from Aldi’s Bremer store brand (including a tasty gyro kit and a pizza-pocket-style sandwich), and we’re definitely excited to be trying more of their offerings.
Today we’re digging into the Bremer Garlic Chicken, which, like the gyro kit, is a full meal in a single package. Unlike the gyro kit, though, this one doesn’t require any prep work or additional components. Rock on, Bremer! Rock on!
You can heat this in the microwave if you’d like to, but the package recommends using a skillet. We decided to listen to these instructions, since this really isn’t difficult or time-consuming to heat up that way. Just toss some butter into the skillet (we actually used vegetable oil here instead), then toss in the contents of the bag. Cook for eight to ten minutes, stirring occasionally. It’s super easy. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the bag, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
The very first thing we noticed about this once we dumped our bag into the skillet was just how much corn there is here. This meal has a ton of corn, as you can see in the image below.
Of course, the corn is very similar in color to the pasta, so that might be a little bit of an illusion. Even so, there’s a huge corn portion here. That’s not a bad thing, because this corn is quite good. It has a buttery, straight-off-the-cob flavor that we really enjoy. A mediocre canned corn could have really put a damper on this meal, but this stuff is very good.
The chicken here is an absolute homerun. It’s jam-packed with tasty chicken falvor, and it’s seasoned a lot more heavily than we were expecting. It packs a flavor wallop! Our only complaint about the chicken here is that this dish doesn’t contain nearly enough of it.
Then there’s the broccoli, which comes in gigantic chunks. You can definitely break them up if the huge chunks aren’t really your thing, but we actually really like the bigger bits. Of course, just because it’s in big pieces doesn’t mean it doesn’t also get everywhere. The tops tend to shed little pieces, which means that every single bite of this dish will have at least a little bit of broccoli in it, even if it’s only some teeny tiny pieces.
The other veggie that does a lot of the talking here is the batch of sliced carrots. These carrot cuts are maybe just a tad soggy around the edges, but they retain some of their crunch in the middle. They also have a rich, carroty flavor with a buttery edge. Yes, we’ve mentioned that buttery flavor twice now, and even though we didn’t use butter in the pan per the instructions, the veggies still have a buttery taste, which is quite nice.
The pasta comes in spirals, and that seems like a great shape for this dish. It’s the garlic sauce, however, that really puts this over the edge. There’s actually not a ton of sauce here, but what’s here has just the perfect amount of flavor to complement the rest of the dish without overpowering it.
This is surprisingly filling. When we first looked at it in a dish, we thought we could probably polish it off in one sitting. It turns out, our reviewer wasn’t able to do that — this is a pretty good helping of food. We’d say it’s at least a serving and a half for a normal person, and you could cut it in half and serve it with a side salad to make a meal for two. The folks at Bremer might be pushing it a little bit when they claim this bag has three servings, though.
If you eat a Bremer-suggested 1/3 of the bag, you’re looking at 190 calories and 400 mg of sodium. If you stick with our recommendation and eat half the bag, you’re up to 285 calories and 600 mg of sodium. That’s really not bad at all, especially considering how much flavor this meal has.
The Bremer Garlic Chicken is an Aldi store-exclusive meal that we can’t recommend highly enough. Every component here is incredible, and they all come together to form a really tasty meal that won’t even bust a diet. We were honestly surprised by how good this is. We were expecting decent to good, and what we ended up with was great!
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
The Bremer Garlic Chicken frozen meal should be relabeled to read Garlic Corn, since there is miniscule chicken in the packet. I had to dig around just to find bits and pieces of the fowl.
I had to buy extra chicken, air fry it, cut it up, and add it to the meal in order to have adequate chicken. It is misleading to the consumer to state chicken in large letters and then to provide so little of it. I shall not purchase this product again.