Product Review- Lundberg Brown Rice Couscous

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I’ve been gluten free for four-and-a-half years now. In that time, I have watched a myriad of products come onto the market. It’s rare that I try a product new to the GF market and am completely disgusted.

Tonight, that happened.

And not only was I disgusted, I was downright mad.

Wednesday, I took the kids for their dental check-up. On the way home, we swung by the store. I was completely excited when I saw Lundberg’s new Brown Rice Couscous. I have a couple of favorite recipes for couscous that I had back when we went gluten-free. I had held on to them, hoping that eventually someone would debut a gluten-free couscous. So I happily grabbed two boxes from the shelf and danced all the way to the check-out line. I planned on making my favorite chicken dish for dinner on Thursday night and the couscous dessert this weekend. It would be a special treat. If the couscous was good, it would be the meal I would request for my birthday coming up shortly.

So, tonight I started making dinner, very excited to once again have a favorite dish available for special occasions. I popped open the box and my heart sank. I took one look at the ‘couscous’ and immediately felt like I had been duped. It’s not really couscous. Couscous is a pasta. This product is nothing more than cracked rice! It’s simply grains of rice that have been cut unto three or four pieces each. I was mad that I had paid so much money for something I could have simply made in my grain mill for a quarter of the cost! It works out to be over $5 a pound!!!

Well, disappointed or not, I decided to go ahead and fix the dish. The couscous is toasted, so it does have the nutty flavor I remember. And the pieces are cut to the right size. So it gets good marks on flavor and mouth-feel. It cooks just like whole rice, so it gets good marks for the ease in fixing it. It also gets good marks for being certified non-GMO. But it gets a big, fat zero from me for value for the cost and false advertising, and that over-rides all of the other considerations. I will not buy this product again, and I have written to the company to express my disgust. Couscous is a pasta, not a cracked grain!

So, I recommend you save your money and run your rice through a grain mill instead. It will be far cheaper and you won’t be supporting a company that is engaging in some false advertising while charging a quadruple price for it!

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Disclaimer: I have received no payment or free product in exchange for this review. I have no financial interest in the product or the company.

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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.

2 Responses to “Product Review- Lundberg Brown Rice Couscous”

1. Tas says:
February 25, 2011 at 03:02 | edit

Maybe they were getting mixed up with burghal which is cracked wheat.
2. KerryAnn Foster says:
February 25, 2011 at 19:35 | edit

That’s possible, Tas, but I sure hope their research department would have better sense! Lundberg is normally a very good company.