Review of Boston Market Oven Roasted Chicken

Back in the day, I used to love getting food from our local Boston Market restaurant.  The price wasn't much more than I’d spend at a typical fast food restaurant and the food was inherently healthier, although still not perfect.  Boston Market came out with a line of frozen foods as well.  These are typically a bit more expensive than other frozen foods.  Recently, though, my local supermarket had them on sale for 4 for $10 so I decided to try a few varieties.

One of the first varieties I tried was Oven Roasted Chicken.

This promised a hearty serving of only white meat chicken with home-style mashed potatoes and gravy and a side of green beans and carrots.  It comes in at a healthy 16 ozs where most other frozen meals are anywhere from 8 to 11 ozs.  The picture on the box looked great.  The directions stated to heat it in the microwave for 8 to 9 minutes on HIGH, then let it sit for another 1 to 2 minutes.  I split the difference and cooked it for 8 ½ minutes.  After that, this was what it looked like.

It was a bit of a disappointment to see this after peeling back the film.  I know to expect that these meals are gussied up for the photo on the box, but here it really seemed deceptive at first.  The carrots appeared to be overcooked a bit after 8 ½ minutes in the microwave.  The chicken appeared almost non-existent under the gravy and dwarfed by the potatoes which looked no different from every other frozen dinner I’d had with mashed potatoes.

The carrots were tender though, without being very mushy.  The green beans were the same.  These had some flavor and there was just enough butter or butter flavor to augment it rather than drowning it in a thin, watery butter-like sauce.  The potatoes tasted like typical frozen mashed potatoes.  I've had Boston Market potatoes back when we had a restaurant near us and they were so much better.  Once I stirred the gravy into them, they tasted better.  The gravy was a bit overpowering in flavor.  It worked good to stir into the potatoes, though.

The chicken breast was actually larger than I thought it would be, it was just covered a bit too much in mashed potatoes & gravy.  Once I cleared some of this off I could see the white-meat chicken was actually a decent size.  It was a bit tough to cut.  Overall, it was tender although I've had chicken that was more tender.  Still, it didn't fall apart and was definitely real chicken, rather than scraps pressed together to look like chicken.

Nutritionally, for the amount of food that comes in the meal it isn't bad overall.  There are 330 containers in the meal.  Of that 80 calories are from fat.  That comes out to 8g of fat, or 13% of the recommended daily value.  Of that, 2.5g are saturated fat, or 12% of the recommended daily value.  Like most frozen entrees, this suffers when it comes to the salt content.  There’s a whopping 1300mg of sodium in the meal, or 54% of the recommended daily value.  Yeah, for someone like me who is already on blood pressure medication, this is a heart attack in a box.  Well, maybe not quite.

I did enjoy Boston Market Oven Roasted Chicken.  It was quite filling without being too high in fat and calories.  The amount of food in this is a lot more than in many other frozen entrees, but it is also typically more expensive.  Still, when it’s on sale it’s a good deal.  I wouldn't want to dine on it every day, especially with the sodium levels that high, but the taste and substance were good enough for me to recommend it.