We’ve been following the cauliflower craze for quite some time now — at least the frozen food portion of it. As it turns out, you can do all sorts of wild things with the stuff, from using it as a rice substitute to making gnocchi out of it. You can even make cauliflower-based crust to provide gluten-free options to foods like pizza.
Lean Cuisine has been experimenting with cauliflower crusts a bit. In fact, they went so far as to make piadas with it. A piada, for the unfamiliar, is an Italian street food that’s basically a flatbread wrap. We checked out Lean Cuisine’s Chicken Mozzarella Piada not long ago, and today we’re getting deeper into this line with the Life Cuisine Gluten Free Lifestyle Cauliflower Crust Chicken Bacon Ranch Piada. We weren’t huge fans of the previous piada, so we’re hoping this one is more of our jam. We do love a good CBR sandwich, so this one has the potential to be a better fit for our personal tastes than the chicken mozzarella version was.
You can cook this in the oven if you’d like, but who’s got time for that? We’re reviewing this on a scorching hot day, so we’re not exactly looking for excuses to fire up the oven and heat up an already-toasty office. No, we’ll stick with the microwave today.
This does come with a crisping tray for microwave use. You’ll need to break open the box and do a bit of folding if you want to use it — but don’t worry, this isn’t origami or anything. You just rip the perforated portions of the box and fold one piece over the top.
Once you’ve got that done, all you have to do is unwrap the piada, stick it on top of the crisping tray, and nuke it in the microwave for three minutes. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
As soon as we pulled this out of the microwave, we realized we were off to a better start than our previous piada. This one is heavier, meaning the filling portion is more generous. The flatbread has more stability to it, so it doesn’t just mush apart in your hands, and there’s not a mess of cheese that gets everywhere.
So how does this taste?
Well, we’re still not 100% sold on the taste of the cauliflower flatbread, since it has bitter undertones that are a bit weird. However, when combined with the earthiness of the spinach and the smokiness of the bacon and chipotle ranch, it actually ends up working.
Really, it’s the sauce that brings this all together. That southwest-style chipotle ranch is a great sauce, with some creaminess and just a little bit of kick. It elevates the whole piada into something that’s definitely worth checking out. It’s just a little bit spicy, but not enough to freak anyone out.
The chicken here is surprisingly high in quality for a Lean Cuisine meal. We expected some pretty average meat, but this stuff is tender and juicy. It also blends well with the chipotle sauce, making the whole thing a treat. The bacon here is pretty stealthy, but that smoky flavor does come to the surface, aided by the sauce.
All things considered, this is a pretty tasty flatbread wrap.
Calorie-counters will find this to be pretty appealing too, as it only has 340 calories. It also has 600 mg of sodium, which is slightly below average for a frozen meal. Plus, this is a bit more filling than the previous piada we tried.
The Life Cuisine Gluten Free Lifestyle Cauliflower Crust Chicken Bacon Ranch Piada is pretty darn delicious. While we’re not completely onboard the cauliflower-crust train quite yet, we think this piada makes really great use of it, blending the cauliflower with flavors that work really well together. We definitely recommend this over the Chicken Mozzarella Piada.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen piada, check out our package scans below.
