El Monterey makes so many similar products that it’s hard for us to keep up with all of them. No matter how many times we scroll through our previous reviews to see what we’ve already covered, we end up scratching our heads when we’re actually staring at the freezer aisle.
You might know El Monterey for their budget-priced frozen burritos, but they make a surprisingly robust amount of chimichangas too. There are so many chimichanga’s in El Monterey’s lineup, in fact, that it probably comes as no surprise that we managed to skip over the El Monterey Signature Chicken, Cheese & Rice Chimichanga.
We skipped over it before today, we mean, because today we’re finally going to mash this sucker into our mouths and let our tastebuds tell the story. The chimichanga we’re reviewing today came as a single, but it does look like El Monterey also sells these in a 12-pack.
The package gives instructions for the microwave, conventional oven, and air fryer. We famously don’t have an air fryer here in the Freezer Meal Frenzy office, and we’ve not found the oven to really do much for El Monterey products in general, so we just decided to microwave this.
The instructions say to cook this for a minute and 20 seconds, which we were suspicious of. Then again, the Cinnabon Frosted CinnaSweet Swirls only take 30 seconds, so we thought it was possible that this chimichanga might be cooked to perfection after just 80 seconds in the microwave. As it turns out, our chimichanga was still cold in the middle, so we stuck it back in for an additional 40 seconds, which seemed to do the trick.
(If you want to read the full cooking instructions for all three methods, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
The shell came out way too soggy for our liking, and the chimichanga started falling apart as a result. If you let the thing cool for a couple minutes, though, it does lose some of that sogginess. Unfortunately, the shell never ends up tasting very good, no matter how soggy or not-soggy it is.
The filling contains a surprisingly competent batch of chicken, which is cut into cubes. It’s a little bit rubbery, but we were honestly expecting much worse — especially after how bland the shell turned out to be.
Aside from that, you’ve got a tiny little dab of monterey jack cheese, as well as some green chili and tomatoes. None of it makes much of an impression, though.
And also, there’s one more thing worth making note of: We thought it was super weird that the title of this chimichanga mentions rice, because if you check out the ingredients list on the package, the rice is in the “2% or less” section. Which means there’s not a noticeable amount of rice here.
One chimichanga contains 280 calories and 410 mg of sodium. Those numbers are a little high if you plan on eating two chimichangas, which seems like a perfectly reasonable amount to us. If you are fine with just one, though, those numbers ain’t too shabby, Abby.
The El Monterey Signature Chicken, Cheese & Rice Chimichanga is uninspired and unimpressive. It doesn’t taste bad, it’s just far blander than a chimichanga should be. Then again, El Monterey isn’t exactly known for making gourmet-quality, chef-inspired meals or anything. Our expectations were fairly low when we picked this up, and we’d say that it met those expectations but didn’t exceed them.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen chimichanga, check out our package scans below.
