If You're Shopping For Prepared Meals At Costco, You Can Safely Skip This One

Here at Tasting Table, we're big fans of making foods from scratch. But we hold convenient meals in high regard as well, because no matter how much you love a homemade meal, sometimes, the pace of life demands a few concessions. Costco is a great place to shop for ready-made meals. To help you narrow down the selection, we tried 11 popular Costco prepared meals and found one that absolutely doesn't live up to the hype: the stuffed bell peppers with beef and rice.

With six halved peppers filled with lots of meat, it's easy to see why these are a popular purchase, but we honestly found them to be "meh" at best. They were bland and uninspiring — a very distant cousin to classic stuffed peppers. The cooking instructions for this dish state you should cover it with tin foil and bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 50 minutes. Despite following the instructions, many have found that the peppers don't really soften; they need longer in the oven than suggested, with one Redditor reporting the peppers baked for an hour and a half before they were done. Making the stuffed peppers in the air fryer reportedly yields better results, though it might be inconvenient if you're trying to make all six of them at once. 

When sampling Costco's peppers, our taste tester added some hot sauce in an attempt to improve the dish. It didn't do much good, to be fair, and it seems that lots of people have a similar thought when eating these stuffed peppers: What can I add to make them better? The Costco subreddit is full of ideas on how to upgrade this unfortunate dish. Some Redditors echoed our preference for spicy additions, while others opted for the age-old solution of simply adding more cheese. One person admitted to eating the peppers alongside kimchi, while another reached for Worcestershire sauce. The best tip we've seen so far is pouring marinara sauce over the peppers and cooking them in the slow cooker. This method apparently simultaneously solves the problem of undercooked peppers and brings the flavor that's otherwise lacking.

While there are many ways to upgrade stuffed peppers, we have to be realistic here. Most of us buy pre-made meals when we don't want to spend extra time on dinner. Purchasing something that's going to need several steps to taste good is really not the goal of convenience meals. Another aspect is the price — for over $20, you'd expect a meal that's done, not something that's just "halfway there" flavor-wise. So the next time you're at Costco, go for the Chicken Street Tacos instead; we found them to be a much better bang for your buck.