Review: Gorton's Grilled Fillets Lemon Pepper Fillets

Because of this blog, there are a lot of types of foods out there that I either didn't like or had never tried before that I have tried as part of my exploration into new foods and things.  One of those things, for example is Greek yogurt.  Another thing that I never liked before but have now made a habit of trying is seafood products.  Because of this, I've done several reviews of Gorton's Grilled Fillet products and that leads me to another review of one of those products with this review of the Gorton's Grilled Fillets Lemon Pepper Fillets.  I picked up this box of fillets at Meijer on sale for $3.00 and each box includes two 3.8 ounce fillets that clock in with 90 calories and sixteen grams of protein per fillet.  The box does not give a good indication of what this is a fillet of, but when you look at the ingredients, you'll come to find out that this is Alaskan Pollock.

Being that this is lemon pepper flavored, I would expect to see lemon pepper as I took these out of the box and as you can see from the pre-cooked photo directly above, that is the case.  As always, the fillet was coated with a butter layer and then sprinkled into that butter layer was lemon pepper seasoning.  The butter layer made the fish quite oily to touch.  Another thing of note was that this Alaskan pollock has a very, very fishy smell before you put it in the oven.  In my opinion, that is borderline nauseating because I'm not a fan of that smell, so prior to cooking, my only hope was that the smell would dissipate as this heated up.

So, off into the oven these went and what you see above is the end result.  Unfortunately, the strong fishy smell did not dissipate and it was overpowering as I took this out of the oven.  The box also warned of the fish losing a lot of water while cooking and that was definitely the case here.  It was almost as if the pollock were trying to return to swimming in the see because this was not just a tiny bit of water, but actually quite a bit.  After biting into this, all I tasted was pepper and no lemon seasoning at all.  Also, this fish because quite tough due to the fact that it lost so much of its moisture while cooking.  Frankly, this was tough to make it through because it was too salty, peppery and dry.  Had there been another flavor to balance those out, it may have been fine, but in this case, the lack of another flavor really hurt this fillets.  In order to choke it down, it needs some sort of sauce like dijon mustard so that you can break up the blandness and pepperyness of the flavor.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I've got to give this a FLY BY IT rating for all the reasons I just mentioned.  Too tough, salty, peppery and lacking flavor do not make for a winning product.  It's too bad too, because Gorton's delivers winners with these Grilled Fillet products more often than not.  That's just not the case here though.

FLY BY IT!!