El Monterey makes a ton of frozen food. When we first started reviewing their stuff, we kind of expected to chomp down maybe six to ten frozen burritos and be done with it. But it seems like every time we go to the grocery store, we find something new by the brand, whether that’s quesadilla meals or boxes of breakfast taquitos.
Today we’re checking out the El Monterey Signature Shredded Steak, Cheese & Rice Chimichanga, which comes in a twelve-pack, but we managed to also find it as a one-off. Now, we could have sworn we’d tasted this already, but as it turns out, we were thinking of the Steak & Three Cheese Chimichanga, which is pretty gosh-darn similar. In fact, we think the chimichanga we’re reviewing today is almost certainly a revision of the one we reviewed previously.
Anyway, this is super easy to heat up in the microwave. And while you can certainly bake this in the oven (or an air fryer) if you’d like to, we’ve never really found that to be necessary with El Monterey products. So we’re nuking this today. We should point out that, just like the Signature Chicken, Cheese & Rice Chimichanga, the recommended cook time of one minute and 20 seconds just isn’t enough. We upped that to two minutes, which is a much more reasonable cook time for this chimichanga.
(If you want to read the full cooking instructions for this chimichanga, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
This thing completely fell apart in the microwave, with cheese oozing out the backside. You can say that it’s our fault for overcooking this, but we did check on it at the 80-second mark, and it was very much still cold in the middle. That recommended cook time just isn’t enough.
Besides, messy isn’t necessarily bad for something like this, and the chimichanga actually tastes pretty great. This starts with a flour tortilla that has a really nice texture, though it does admittedly get kind of soggy in the microwave.
But the real winner here is the three-cheese blend. This contains cheddar, Monterey jack, and a second type of Monterey jack that has peppers in it. Yes, the melty cheese is part of what makes this messy, but it’s also a good part of what makes it taste so delightful. It’s a really tasty cheese combo that melts into every nook and cranny of the filling.
The rest of the filling is a shredded beef, which is unremarkably but competent enough, as well as some tomatoes and green chili. When gooped up in the cheese, the overall flavor really ends up being a good one.
One chimichanga contains 280 calories (80 from fat) and 420 mg of sodium. That doesn’t seem too bad at first, but keep in mind that these are pretty dang small and a person could easily eat two of them and still have room for dessert. Those numbers don’t seem quite as low now, do they?
The El Monterey Signature Shredded Steak, Cheese & Rice Chimichanga is pretty messy, but it’s also surprisingly tasty. While we doubt we’ll make this a regular part of our meal rotation, we can definitely see ourselves packing a half dozen of these in the back of the freezer for when the cheesy chimi craving hits.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen chimichanga, check out the package scans below.
