Review of Boston Market Turkey Breast Medallions

One of my pet peeves over the years with frozen meals is how deceptive their marketing is.  The end product almost never looks anything remotely like what it appears on the box.  I’ve seen food drowned in gravy, or boxes that show an abundance of beautiful chunks of meat only to find a few pieces that were anything I could sink my teeth into.  Perhaps the worst, though is how these products are photographed for the packaging.  The food is usually put on a plate much smaller than a dinner plate to make it appear that there’s more food.

In the case of Boston Market Turkey Breast Medallions, I was actually surprised that this was not quite as offensive as other products in the frozen dinner category.  There is at least a substantial amount of food, even if it doesn’t exactly look like the cover of the box:

The dinner is touted as tender breast of turkey, home-style mashed potatoes and gravy, with carrots and green beans. It’s also larger than many other frozen dinners.  Most of the ones I’ve come across weigh in at 8 to 10 ozs of food.  This one is 14 ozs.  There is a good, filling serving of food here.  It gets heated for 4 minutes in the microwave on high, then it’s supposed to be stirred and put back in for another 1 ½ to 2 minutes.  After letting it sit in the microwave for 1-2 minutes, it’s ready.  I had a problem with stirring the food.  It just didn’t seem like there was that much to stir and as I tried to do it, I found that some of the turkey ended up in the potatoes, and some of the potatoes ended up in the vegetables.  It’s an awkward thing to try to do.

However, for something that comes from Boston Market, I was a little disappointed.  The biggest issue is the potatoes.  Home-style mashed potatoes? Please.  These are no different than every other frozen dinner with mashed potatoes, despite the fact that they look quite nice on the box.  They don’t have much flavor, either until the gravy is stirred into them.  Without the gravy, they are more reminiscent of wallpaper paste.  The gravy doesn’t have a lot of flavor outside of salt, but it was enough to add some to the awful potatoes.

The turkey medallions, however, were nice.  These were tender bits of turkey.  Some did fall apart, leaving behind bits of turkey in the gravy that I later stirred into the potatoes.  I did like this quite a bit.  The carrots and green beans were good too.  They were tender but not soft, and tasted like they had a light coating of butter or butter-like flavor.

Nutritionally, I didn’t find this to be that bad.  There’s just 290 calories in the dinner, which is quite good for the amount of food in it.  Of that, 80 calories are from fat.  That works out to 9g of fat, or 14% of the recommended daily value.  In there is 2.5g of saturated fat, or 12% of the recommended daily value.  Like most frozen dinners, it’s quite high in sodium at 1050mg or 44% of the recommended daily value.  I suspect the bulk of it is in the gravy from how it tasted.

I normally love turkey and was hoping for good things from this frozen dinner. The potatoes were particularly bad for some reason, whether it was the particular batch with this frozen dinner or something else, I don’t know. It’s enough to make me reconsider whether or not I’d buy this again, which is a shame because I did enjoy the rest of the frozen dinner. With the high sodium content, I wouldn’t recommend eating it on a regular basis.