When we first launched Freezer Meal Frenzy, we thought to ourselves, “What happens if we review every frozen meal out there? Do we just call it quits at that point, or do we expand into other types of content?”
As it turns out, that was an absolutely ridiculous thing to think about. We will never be able to review every single frozen meal in the world, especially if we keep up the pace of posting one review per day. There’s just too much frozen food that we haven’t gotten to. We’ve published over 2,000 reviews so far, and that only covers a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s out there.
But even so, we thought that we’d at least manage to review every single one of Trader Joe’s frozen burritos. That seemed like a reasonable goal. As it turns out, we still missed at least one. The Trader Joe’s Bean, Rice & Cheese Burritos had, before today, eluded the watchful eyes of our TJ’s-loving staff.
Now, this is not to be confused with the mega-popular 99% Fat Free Bean & Rice Burritos, which we did review back in 2018 (and those ones have about half the calories). No, this appears to be a new product — or, at the very least, a product that doesn’t have a lot of coverage. We couldn’t find any information about these at all in our relentless searching. In fact, when we Googled them, the very first thing that came up was our own review for the 99% Fat Free burritos.
But today we make things right. Today we’re finally checking out the Trader Joe’s Bean, Rice & Cheese Burritos and giving you our thoughts.
The package lists out instructions for both the microwave and the oven, but we figure that most folks will probably just nuke these, so that’s what we did for this review. And, if we’re being honest, we kind of lost track of time for a bit and ended up getting a little behind on things — avoiding a long cook time will help us get caught up. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
Now, our first burrito came out a little bit soggy, which is a result of having to cover it with a moist paper towel before cooking it. It’s possible that we over-moistened our paper towel, but we do think it’s difficult to avoid the sogginess when you cook a burrito that way.
We decided to experiment with our second burrito, so we nuked it without using the paper towel trick. The shell came out a bit dry on top (though very much still damp on the bottom), but we really don’t mind that. In fact, we generally prefer an overly dry tortilla to an overly soggy one.
As far as flavor goes, this is pretty alright. The pinto beans do most of the talking here, and the rice plays wingman. It’s not a terrible taste, and the pinto beans aren’t dried out, which can sometimes be a problem with frozen burritos. We do wish there were just a little more cheese, though. We suppose we could melt some on top of these burritos ourselves, but we really would have liked a cheesier meal today.
These do have kind of a “vegetable soup” flavor to them, which we assume is a result of the tomatoes. These burritos do seem to go a little heavy on the tomato content. No, you won’t find chunks of tomatoes inside or anything, but you’ll definitely taste something tomatoey lurking in the filling.
One of these burritos contains about 240 calories and 550 mg of sodium. That’s pretty average for frozen burritos of this size, though we must point out that a single burrito is pretty small. You could easily eat both burritos in a sitting, and still have plenty of room for dessert.
The Trader Joe’s Bean, Rice & Cheese Burritos are surprisingly average. These definitely aren’t as good as any of TJ’s non-frozen burritos, but they are better in quality than your average gas station burrito. While we’d be thrilled to see this level of quality from a brand like El Monterey, we hold TJ’s to a higher standard than that, so we were somewhat unimpressed by these burritos. They’re not bad at all; they’re just not amazing.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen burritos, check out our package scan below.
