While we love ourselves a good teriyaki chicken, and we have a fair amount of respect for the Michelina’s budget-friendly line of frozen food (we do enjoy their mac and cheese), we’re not sure Michelina’s has what it takes to make a decent teriyaki chicken. To be clear, we appreciate their low-cost take on frozen meals (we think we paid $1.25 for the meal we’re reviewing today), but we also acknowledge that the brand prioritizes cost over quality.
Plus, we’ve been getting Chinese food delivered way more than we probably should, so our standards for Asian food are a bit higher than they would normally be.
So we’re going into the Michelina’s Teriyaki Chicken with some reservations. We’ve had more bad teriyaki than anyone should ever endure in a lifetime, and the frozen food world is full of dishes that just don’t make the cut. This meal is setting out to achieve what so many others have failed at. Let’s find out if it can live up to its lofty ambitions.
First, of course, we must cook it. That’s a simple process: Simply rip open the corner of the package, then plop this into the microwave for two and a half minutes. Give it a quick stir, then put it back in for another 60 to 90 seconds. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
As you can see in the image above, Michelina’s cuts corners by selling their meals inside cardboard trays, with no inner packaging. This does keep the cost low, but it also means these won’t last as long in your freezer as, say, a Stouffer’s meal.
Now, we have to give the brand some credit for trying, but as we initially assumed, this one really doesn’t turn out all that great. The problems begin with the chicken. This doesn’t surprise us, because we’ve had enough Michelina’s meals to know what to expect in this regard, but the chicken here comes in small cubes that are really salty. They almost taste like cubes of not-actual-chicken that were soaked overnight in chicken broth. Not the best protein for a teriyaki dish.
Then you’ve got the white rice, which is watery and bland. While we didn’t expect a ton of flavor from this rice, we also didn’t expect it to be so waterlogged.
There are some veggies to liven things up a bit, of course. Those include broccoli, carrots, and water chestnuts. None of these tastes particularly fresh, and they all kind of have that frozen-and-thawed flavor to them. Not the best veggies we’ve had.
The one saving grace is the teriyaki sauce, which is maybe a bit too sugary, but it still ends up bringing some semblance of teriyaki flavor to this dish. We know it’s extra-sweet to cover up the blandness of the rest of the meal, but it does kind of work. We take this as a sign that Michelina’s knows exactly what they’re doing here — making the cheapest possible version of a beloved dish, then covering its flaws with sweetness.
The calorie count is pretty low. With 310 calories per dish, this certainly won’t bust any diets. Then again, it’s not all that filling, and it also comes with 710 mg of sodium, which is kind of a lot for a dish that feels like half a meal.
The Michelina’s Teriyaki Chicken has a lot of flaws. That’s exactly what we expected, of course, because this entire meal cost us $1.25 on sale. You get what you pay for, we guess, and we certainly didn’t pay for a gourmet meal.
Of course, the next time that craving for teriyaki hits, we’re going to call out for delivery instead of cooking up another one of these frozen meals.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen batch of teriyaki chicken, check out our package scan below.
