If you don’t want to sacrifice a chunk of your paycheck at a restaurant or deal with the mess of cooking and cleaning in your own kitchen, there are tasty alternatives for you to enjoy juicy, savory steak for dinner at home. Available at a fraction of the cost it would be to purchase a tasty restaurant steak, a frozen steak dinner, heated and served directly in its tray, is a price-friendly option that’s conveniently ready in minutes with minimal cleanup. Another major advantage of these frozen dinners is that they all come as a complete meal, accompanied by sides like broccoli, green beans, potatoes, or rice.
Keeping a few boxes stashed in your home freezer sets you up for an easygoing meal when you want a hearty protein fix without leaving the cozy comfort of your couch. Perusing the freezer aisle at any grocery store, you’ll find a wide variety of beefy favorites, like zingy barbecue or garlic butter. If you’re having some trouble deciding what’s best, I rounded up eight different frozen steak dinners to test them. The work was effortless — a few rounds in the microwave, and I was feasting on meaty mains and tender veggies without changing out of my PJs and slippers. Read on for which ones I ranked the worst and which ones secured the top spots.
8. Stouffer’s Steak Queso & Rice
Stouffer’s Steak Queso & Rice was a family-sized disaster, a behemoth of a let-down. The casserole-style, multi-serving dish had a base of rice and queso sauce mixed with grilled steak strips, onions, black beans, corn kernels, and poblano peppers. Enticed by the photo on the box, I was salivating over a thick and creamy spoonful of a fluffy, cheesy rice mix speckled with juicy pieces of steak and a colorful assortment of vegetables. The reality was a culinary nightmare I hope I’ll never have to experience again. You’re better off elevating a store-bought queso dip with add-ins than buying this dinner.
There was no delectably ooey-gooey, magical jacuzzi of queso — instead, there was a horribly broken sauce that separated into gritty cheese bits and a watery, soupy mess. The sauce had an extremely acidic taste to it, like there was triple the amount of lime juice that should have been in the original recipe. Hiding amongst the undercooked rice grains and curdy liquid, the tiny steak pieces were meagre and chewy, and the vegetables were sad and sparse. I don’t get to use the words “gloopy” and “icky” all that often, but this dinner is the perfect opportunity to use them as the most accurate descriptors.
7. Healthy Choice Café Steamers Barbecue Seasoned Steak with Potatoes
Over the years of being an avid consumer and an experienced professional throughout the food and hospitality industries, I’ve learned that many ready-made meals tend to amplify the sweetness content of barbecue condiments. Despite attempting to maintain a fair ranking system, my discerning bias against a frozen dinner like Healthy Choice Café Steamers Barbecue Seasoned Steak with Potatoes was already fairly negative. Once again, after giving this dinner a taste, I was right. With as much liquid as a stew, everything was swimming in a sickeningly sweet whiskey barbecue sauce with an unappetizing added smoke flavor and no spicy backbone. This is a situation where the sauce completely overtook all the other ingredients and pretty much ruined the whole dish. Chowhound does have 15 ways to improve store-bought barbecue sauce, but doesn’t all that work just defeat the purpose of purchasing a pre-made frozen dinner?
Briefly forgetting about the sauce to focus on the other components, everything else wasn’t that bad. The vegetables included nicely sized pieces of bell peppers, onions, and corn mixed with large wedges of russet potatoes. The steak strips were a bit bouncy, but they weren’t sinewy. Another element that impressed me was how similar the actual product was to the photo on the box, a rarity that I recognized immediately and lessened my overall sense of disappointment in the sauce itself.
6. Stouffer’s Bowl-Fulls Slow-Roasted Steak & Potatoes
I adore mashed potatoes, but I don’t always want to cook them from scratch and fret over remembering all the tips and tricks to make a bowl of spuds absolutely perfect. So, I was excited that at least one meal among these eight frozen dinners included a side of them. The mashed potatoes in the Stouffer’s Bowl-Fulls Slow-Roasted Steak & Potatoes were delicious. They were light, buttery, fluffy, and filling, and I couldn’t ask for a better frozen dinner side. Unfortunately, that was the only good thing going for the dinner.
While none of the other dinner trays smelled of plastic as I was microwaving them, this was the first one I noticed how badly the plastic smell reeked when heating, which I couldn’t help but notice infused into the meal itself. The steak tasted tough and fake, and somehow the green beans and carrots were soft yet rubbery at the same time. There was also an off-putting flavor I wasn’t able to figure out until I more closely analyzed the ingredients list: “Smoke flavor” was listed as an ingredient, an unnecessary addition for a frozen dinner concept that was already suffering and absolutely did not need that severe artificiality piled onto its messy situation.
5. Healthy Choice Asian-Style Steak & Peppers
There wasn’t anything special about Healthy Choice’s Asian-Style Steak & Peppers, and I wouldn’t buy it again. I’m not delighted that “Asian-style” to Healthy Choice means a bizarrely sweetened and syrupy glaze with nearly undetectable amounts of sesame, ginger, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. Mixed together with dry rice pellets, rubbery steak, and tiny fragments of soft and mushy bell peppers, the main course did not impress me. The broccoli was the worst side of the entire lineup, with overcooked and limp florets emitting their sulfuric sadness.
There were a few positives that kept it from the bottom. Though poorly prepared, the rice still provided a starchy base that created a more filling and complete dinner. And even though the meat had a spring in its step, it at least wasn’t grisly and inedible, and the pieces were bigger and heartier compared to the smaller bits from the other dinners. I also appreciated that there was some attempt at a spicy heat level to give the dinner a tiny punch of personality, with chili paste in the sauce and red pepper flakes in the broccoli.
4. Lean Cuisine Protein Kick Steak Portabella
If Lean Cuisine’s mission is to sell calorie-friendly frozen meals, it certainly succeeded. At less than 200 calories per serving, the Protein Kick Steak Portabella was a teeny-tiny snack pack, a minuscule speck of food that left me hungry soon after finishing the meal. The appearance also left a lot to the imagination — the mix looked like a half-eaten serving of a very sad-looking beef stew in a shallow tray.
But despite all these initial complaints, I still enjoyed it more than four of the others. The steak was soft and tender, and I had zero issues with gristle, though some cuts had an oddly spongy texture that was difficult to differentiate from the small chunks of mushrooms. The broccoli mixed along with the mushrooms and steak had a nice textural bite to them. Even though the sauce was on the thinner side, it still was not a disappointment due to its concentrated savory flavor from the beef and mushrooms. If there were double the amount, I would be far more satisfied than in my current slightly hungry state.
3. Evol Garlic Herb Steak
Fresh and colorful, Evol’s Garlic Herb Steak was a refreshing deviation from the heavier offerings laden with cheese, gravy, and sweet sauces. Removing the film halfway through microwaving to give it a little stir, I knew I would be in for a treat: It smelled bright and enticing, and the taste was better than what I could ever have expected coming from a frozen dinner. The source of the smell, the obvious shining star here, was definitely the sauce that coats the mix of steak and potatoes. Akin to a chimichurri, a South American sauce that’s just as good on steak as it is on eggs and so much more, the vibrant condiment was a mix of coarsely chopped garlic and herbs like cilantro, parsley, and oregano mixed with oil and red wine vinegar. The bright herbs and the acidic vinegar created a light and lovely sauce that wasn’t weighed down by too much dairy or binding agents.
I don’t have any complaints either about the side of broccoli florets, which were perfectly al dente and mixed in a flavorful seasoned butter. As for the main dish, the steak and potatoes, this is where things start to turn sour. The potatoes were nicely cooked, but there were so many more spuds compared to the cubed steak pieces. And among the sad selection of steak chunks, 90% were so chewy and grisly that they were inedible. Basically, what I had to do was push aside all the partially chewed meat to one corner and dig into the herby potatoes and buttery broccoli. The sauce was the savior and is the main reason why Evol earned a higher ranking. I’d drizzle that sauce over anything … except over more sinewy steak bits.
2. Marie Callender’s Garlic Butter Steak Bites
Finally — a real, cozy-up-on-the-couch, honest-to-goodness meal. Marie Callender’s Garlic Butter Steak Bites brought to the table everything the previous competitors left behind: good flavors, a generous serving size, and enjoyable textures. This was the first dinner that I actually looked forward to going in for a second bite. There were a few gristly pieces of steak, but most of them were fairly tender. The russet potatoes were cooked beautifully, but the trend continues with this frozen dinner of the uneven (though cost-effective) ratio of far more pieces of potatoes to chunks of steak. The side of crunchy green beans was a light and refreshing addition, and still held onto their textural integrity without becoming mushy and overcooked during the heating process.
The thick and creamy sauce was a luscious coating for the beef and potatoes. And while I thought there was a hint of too much onion compared to the advertised garlic, the sauce was still a delicious and buttery counterpart to the meat and veggies. And with a surprise appearance of chardonnay wine in the ingredients list, the sauce had a dynamic and memorable flavor, even if it was a little heavy on the onion.
1. Boston Market Beef Steak & Pasta
Boston Market’s Beef Steak & Pasta was a stick-to-the-ribs comfort food dream, and was without any doubt my favorite option among the meals, though the competition wasn’t too fierce. Big, tender chunks of prime rib roast, pleasantly thick and chewy Mafalda pasta ribbons, and small bits of mushrooms were all mixed together in a brown gravy sauce. There was a very apparent similarity to a beef stroganoff, with a deeply beefy, earthy flavor as if it was prepared by loving, experienced hands and slowly simmering away for hours. But at least in this quick microwaveable version, you don’t have to spend any time carefully tending to it on the stove, worrying about all the big mistakes to fumble over when cooking beef stroganoff from scratch.
The dish was super savory, rich, and filling, a far cry from all the health-conscious, lightened-up flops by many of the other brands. This isn’t one that you want to pay any attention to the nutrition facts, particularly the extreme amount of sodium, accounting for well over 50% of one’s daily intake. Again, with this purchase, you intend to feed your body and soul with a comforting meal — and that’s worth its salt!
Methodology
When it comes to the meat proponent of these frozen dinners, I obviously was not expecting top-quality wagyu beef or a gorgeous thick cut of filet mignon cooked to an expert mid-rare preference. But I still set some basic expectations I thought would be realistically achievable for frozen steak dinners. How much did the meat taste like a semi-decent steak? Was it moist and tender? Or was it dry, chewy, or sinewy? Was there enough steak to be considered a satisfying single-serving amount?
As for the sides and other mix-ins, was there enough balance with these accompaniments and the steak? How was the sauce-to-solids ratio? Were all the vegetables cooked adequately, depending on what they were? For example, did vegetables like broccoli or green beans maintain a crisp-tender texture after reheating, or were they overcooked and mushy? If the dinner included mashed potatoes, were they soft and fluffy? Or were they dry or gluey?
There were many other factors to review during the taste-testing process: I studied the ingredient lists, I paid close attention to the level of seasoning, and I also considered aroma and final presentation. To introduce another discerning palate for a fair analysis, I also had my husband — a fellow food industry professional — try all of the contenders and took his opinions into serious consideration along with my own. The final question I asked myself was simple and straightforward: Would I buy it again?
Dining and Cooking