Lean Cuisine is really starting to get creative with cauliflower. This is good for both lovers of cauliflower and anyone who’s avoiding gluten, and we’re all about it here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. The people want more options, so give ’em more options!
Now, the Life Cuisine sub-brand is going so far as to offer cauliflower crust flatbread sandwiches (called piadas), and we can’t wait to try them out. So today, we’re cooking up a Life Cuisine Gluten Free Lifestyle Cauliflower Crust Chicken Mozzarella Piada.
This comes with oven cooking instructions, but it also comes with a crisping tray that we wanted to experiment with, so we cooked ours in the microwave. We do think most people will probably choose the microwave over the oven for these, because it only takes three minutes.
If you go with the microwave, like we did, you’ll need to fold the box, then unwrap the piada and place it on top the crisping tray like a mini pizza. Then just nuke it for three minutes and fold it over to complete the flatbread sandwich look and feel. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
There are couple things we should point out here. First, this ends up kind of messy. The cheese melted all over our tray while it was cooking. Second, the cauliflower crust is really soggy. You’ll probably want to eat this with a fork rather than picking it up with your hands.
Aside from the sogginess, the shell does its work. Unless you pick it apart and eat just a piece of shell by itself, you might not even notice that this is a cauliflower crust based on flavor alone. The consistency, of course, is the big tell here.
Inside, you’ve got chicken, mozzarella cheese, and chipotle aioli. We have no complaints with the chicken or mozzarella here. The chicken is pretty good (though not amazing), and the mozzarella lends its stretchy appeal to the whole affair.
The biggest problem we have is that there’s an acidic taste to the chipotle aioli, followed by an almost rubbery aftertaste. If we could just get rid of that aftertaste, we think we’d really like this, but that flavor really knocks this down a peg.
And yes, this is just a little bit spicy, so if you’re avoiding spicy foods, this is not for you.
This is just a little high in calories. With 350 calories, this certainly won’t destroy a diet, but it’s also not very filling for that calorie count. You’ll probably be running back to the freezer for more food when you’re done. There’s also 610 mg of sodium, which is actually lower than average for a frozen food, but if you end up grabbing seconds, that number looks less comforting.
The Life Cuisine Gluten Free Lifestyle Cauliflower Crust Chicken Mozzarella Piada has a weird aftertaste. Without it, this would be easy to recommend to anyone trying to reduce their gluten intake. With that aftertaste, though, this becomes a lot harder to recommend. We wish we could get rid of that, because we think we’d really enjoy this otherwise.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this gluten-free frozen food, check out our package scans below.
