After sampling a smorgasbord of Dr. Praeger’s vegetarian frozen food options, we’ve been trying out their fish-based foods. They have a pretty healthy sampling too, from Buffalo-flavored fish bites to kid-friendly fish-shaped snacks. Today, we’re looking at something that’s perhaps a little less exciting than the other offerings we mentioned: the Dr. Praeger’s Lightly Breaded Fish Sticks. This is the most basic version of their fish stick offerings.
The box lists several different ways to cook these, but we chose the regular old oven. This method takes about 20 minutes. (If you want to see all the cooking instructions, you can see those on our package scans at the bottom of this article.)
The fish here is Alaskan pollock, which is pretty standard for fish sticks these days. The box makes it sound like these are made from whole fillets taken directly from the freshly caught fish. We can’t really verify how fresh the fish were when they got chopped into fillets, but we think they taste pretty good.
Real fish fillets have a tendency to break apart in thin layers that sort of run diagonally through the fillet. The fish here has that same quality, so we can confirm these were made from sliced-up fillets rather than some sort of gelatinous mix of ground fish (the “Fishies” version uses minced fish rather than whole fillets, so we found it worthwhile to clarify this here).
The “lightly breaded” part of the title refers to the panko breadcrumbs that make up the breading here. This means the breading is thinner and a bit more crispy than your typical fish stick breading. Well, we use the word crispy here because we’re avoiding the word hard. The individual grains of breading here are a little gravelly. Also, we understand that using a lighter breading reduces the calories, but we think it reduces the flavor as well. A nice breading can really add a lot to a plate of fish.
We do love a good tarter sauce with our fish, and we found that these almost require some sort of sauce to make them work. They don’t have a lot of flavor on their own.
The box considers three fish sticks to be a serving, and estimates that there are 3.5 servings in a box. That comes out to 10.5 fish sticks. Our package had 11 fish sticks, and one of them was considerably shorter than the others, so the math ended up being pretty spot-on for us.
If you eat the suggested serving size of three, that’ll be 170 calories (70 from fat) and 180 mg of sodium. If you end up eating the whole box in a sitting (which is a feasible task), that becomes 595 calories (245 from fat) and 630 mg of sodium. So that means the ideal serving is probably half of a box.
The Dr. Praeger’s Lightly Breaded Fish Sticks go great with some tarter sauce, but we find them to be a little bland on their own. They’re not terrible; they just need a little something extra to make them pop.
To learn more about the nutritional content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these fish sticks, check out our package scans below.
