While we review a ton of frozen food here at Freezer Meal Frenzy (we’ve published more than 1,000 frozen food reviews), we still haven’t found a frozen lo mein dish that we can get excited about. Even the Trader Joe’s Low Fat Chicken Chow Mein didn’t do it for us, and we typically love Trader Joe’s food.
However, when we discovered the PF Chang’s Home Menu Shrimp Lo Mein, we thought we might have finally found a lo mein dish we’ll be telling all of our friends to try. At a glance, it’s the perfect thing to satisfy a lo mein craving, and to even scratch a little bit of the seafood itch.
Now, the bag recommends cooking this for a total of 10 minutes, but we actually didn’t need quite that much time. If you shorten the cook time, be very careful about making sure the shrimp is cooked all the way through. Still, we think you can probably cut a minute or two off that cook time. In fact, we cut about two minutes, and our noodles still ended up being a little crispy.
One of the things that happens to this during the cooking process is that the shrimp shrink a whole lot. Yes, this is to be expected of frozen shrimp, but the shrinking effect is startlingly intense here. Those giant, pink pieces of shrimp end up becoming pretty tiny — some of them shrinking down to about the size of a thumbnail.
The shrinkage is a little bit of a bummer, because otherwise the shrimp is fantastic. It has a shimpy flavor without being too seafoody, and it’s moist with a nice crunch to it.
The lo mein noodles are really great. If you cook them how we did, you might end up with some crispy pieces, which is actually kind of appealing in a lo mein dish. It’s the sauce, though, that really brings everything together. It’s a sticky soy sauce with chicken broth and garlic in it, and it makes the whole meal into something special.
You’ll also find carrots, mushrooms, celery, and bok choy in the mix. We would have loved to see fewer carrots and more mushrooms, but this is really just a nitpick.
This is part of the Meal for 2 line, so it’s designed for two people to share. If you end up eating that amount, you’ll be taking in 420 calories and 930 mg of sodium. This is clearly not a diet food, and it gets even worse if you end up eating the full bag in a siting. And eating a bag in a sitting isn’t as daunting a task as it might seem — the image just a few paragraphs above shows a full bag’s contents in a serving dish.
The PF Chang’s Home Menu Shrimp Lo Mein is the best frozen lo mein dish we’ve tried yet. It’s really high in calories and sodium, but it tastes great. While we can’t recommend this to dieters, it does make a fantastic cheat-day meal for anyone with a serious lo mein craving.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen lo mein, check out our package scans below.
