If you’re looking for some super-cheap frozen meals, Michelina’s has your back. We picked up a handful of their frozen foods for a buck a piece (on sale from their regular $1.39 price), and we’ve been impressed by the variety of their selections. We have, of course, been keeping our expectations in line with that low, low price point.
Today, we’re checking out something we were a bit surprised to find in their lineup, the Michelina’s Buffalo-Style Chicken Snackers. These are the Michelina’s take on pizza rolls, though with a buffalo-style twist. Call us intrigued!
You can cook these in the oven if you’d like, but the microwave is a very tempting option, since it only takes about 90 seconds to heat these up. We decided to take the easy way out and nuke these suckers. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
One of the ways Michelina’s cuts down on production costs is by skipping the inner packaging altogether. The box is actually the tray, with no inner seal or anything to protect the food, as you can see in the image below. The box serves double-duty as both the outer packaging and a cardboard serving tray.
The outer shells of our snackers ended up a bit soggy, but we admit we’re to blame for that — we knew that was part of the deal when we decided on using the microwave instead of the oven. It’s honestly not a huge problem, but avoiding soggy shells is really important to you, you’ll want to use the oven.
Worse than the consistency, though, is the fact that the shells have a weird, plasticy aftertaste that’s incredibly unappealing. The good news, however, is that the sauce inside hides this pretty well.
The package describes the sauce as a “spicy tomato sauce,” though it tastes very much like a traditional buffalo sauce to us. It has that slightly vinegary flavor with a hint of blue cheese (according to the ingredients, there is powdered bleu cheese here, so that makes sense). This does not taste even vaguely like a tomato-based sauce. It is a little bit spicy, though, so that part of the phrase is somewhat accurate.
So there’s chicken inside too, right? Well, yeah, but it’s just a tiny little gob of shredded chicken surrounded by the very potent sauce. You won’t taste the chicken at all, but it does lend just a little bit of that shredded-chicken stringiness to the filling and gives it a little substance.
The package lists 10 snacks as a serving size, claiming there should be about 1.5 servings in a box (our box had exactly 15). Keep in mind that this box weighs almost nothing, so splitting it into multiple servings seems odd to us. If you eat just 10 snacks, you’re looking at 190 calories and 460 mg of sodium. If you eat 15, you’re up to 270 calories and 690 mg of sodium. The latter seems like a pretty average amount for a frozen meal, so the decision to split the contents into multiple servings doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.
The Michelina’s Buffalo-Style Chicken Snackers make for a really good buffalo-style snack on a budget. While these are definitely a low-cost food, they’re also really tasty in that “guilty pleasure” sort of way. No, these don’t hold a candle to the Devour Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese, but at just a quarter of the price, we didn’t expect them to. For a buck, it’s really hard to go wrong with these chicken snackers.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen pizza rolls, check out our package scan below.
