The Hungry-Man brand is a staple of the frozen food aisle at many grocery stores. Yet, for some reason, we’ve never reviewed any of their products here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. It’s not that we have an anti-Hungry-Man bias or anything; it’s just something that we oddly have never gotten around to.
Well, today all of that changes, because today we’re checking out the Hungry-Man Chicken Bacon Ranch Double Chicken Bowl, a frozen meal that’s apparently made for hungry men. Luckily, we have a hungry man on staff, and he tried out this microwavable monstrosity to see what it’s all about.
As you might expect from a meal that boasts of its own manliness, this comes with a pretty hefty microwave time requirement. You’ll pop it in for four and a half minutes, give it a stir, then pop it back in for another three or four minutes. That’s a total cook time of seven-and-a-half to eight-and-a-half minutes. You can also cook it in the oven if you’d like, but that will take you 50 to 55 minutes. For a frozen food, this requires an extensive amount of cookin’. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Very recently, we encountered another mashed-potato-filled meal with a very long cook time, and we found that all those minutes in the microwave ended up completely destroying the mashed potatoes. So the first thing we were curious about when we decided to check out this Hungry-Man meal was how the potatoes would survive all that time in the microwave.
This meal does a couple things that really help those potatoes stay potato-ey through all that cook time. First, they drench these suckers in ranch dressing (a move that we appreciate as Midwesterners), and second, they keep some chunks of potato in the mix instead of mashing all of it into a goop. It does still end up a little bit gravely in texture, but there’s also a creaminess that smooths that out. And those potato chunks really are a nice touch.
There are a few chunks of bacon in this, but they’re mostly just here to complete the bacon requirement of the Chicken Bacon Ranch descriptor. This stuff is chewy and kind of tastes like those Purina Beggin’ dog treats (yes, we do know what those taste like, because… reasons?) But those pieces of bacon are few and far between. We only found maybe five big chunks in this entire meal, with some smaller pieces here and there.
The main event, of course, is the chicken. There are two full patties of chicken breast here. Unfortunately, they’re kind of rubbery and dry, and they have a weird charred flavor that tastes fake to us. It’s almost like they dumped a bunch of liquid smoke onto this while it was cooking so that it seemed like it might have been grilled. On top of that, there’s a weird citrusy aftertaste, like someone squeezed a little bit of lime onto each patty. We’re not sure where that flavor comes from, but it does leave us a little concerned. Dunking the chicken in the potatoes does hide the dryness and the weird flavor a little bit, but not enough to salvage the chicken entirely.
As you probably guessed by now, this is not something you’ll find in the diet section of your grocery store (if your grocery store even has a diet section). This come packed with 570 calories and a whipping 1,950 mg of sodium. This isn’t made for calorie counters, and man oh man, it’s not made for people who are watching their sodium levels.
The Hungry-Man Chicken Bacon Ranch Double Chicken Bowl pairs a halfway decent batch of mashed potatoes with a couple chicken patties that are pretty bad-tasting. We would have gladly traded the second chicken patty for some extra mashed potatoes. As is, this meal is pretty skippable.
We do want to try more of Hungry-Man’s dishes, because this one might just be a dud among a batch of real firecrackers. It would be a shame to write off a whole brand because of one bad experience.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
