We’ve been looking for a good frozen orange chicken dish for a while now, but we haven’t had a lot of luck so far. Of course, we did find the Trader Joe’s Mandarin Orange Chicken, which is phenomenal, but aside from that, nothing we’ve tried has been all that great (and some of it has been really bad).
But it seems like PF Chang’s Home Menu, the frozen food line from the PF Chang’s restaurant chain, would be able to pull of a tasty orange chicken dish, right? Well, today we’re sampling the PF Chang’s Home Menu Sichuan Style Orange Chicken to find out.
This is easy enough to cook. Simply pop it in the microwave for five minutes and it’s done. Of course, it comes out of the microwave looking a bit pale, as you can see in the image below.
With some of PF Chang’s other frozen dishes, a little bit of stirring will refresh some of the missing color. That’s not the case here — this is just a pale-looking dish all around. It also smells a little weird.
Despite the warning signs, we knew we had to actually taste this before deciding whether or not it’s a bad meal. We started with the chicken, which is surprisingly low in quality. This is crumbly, flavorless stuff, but it’s also covered in orange sauce.
And the orange sauce actually tastes a whole lot better than it smells. It has a rich, sweet citrus flavor. While the scent is a bit like discarded orange peels, the flavor leans really hard into the inherent sweetness of its orange marmalade base. The rice is really good at absorbing this sauce, so every bite should have some of that orange flavor to it.
This dish is also loaded with kale and spinach. If you love your greens, this will be a good thing, but if you’re not crazy about the stuff you certainly aren’t going to be happy with the amount of kale and spinach here. You’ll definitely want to check your teeth after eating this to make sure you don’t have a big, green spinach smile.
There are also some bell peppers in this dish, both red and yellow. They’re a little soggy, but otherwise we don’t have much to complain about here. They’re really just sort of there.
Some of PF Chang’s frozen offerings can be a little weighty in the calorie department. Thankfully, the Sichuan Style Orange Chicken bucks that trend, with just 320 calories. Of course, it does contain 1,310 mg of sodium, which is a real kick in the pants — that’a a ton of sodium!
The PF Chang’s Home Menu Sichuan Style Orange Chicken isn’t great, but it’s also not terrible. It’s a halfway decent frozen meal, though we very much prefer Trader Joe’s Mandarin Orange Chicken to this. If quality is what you’re looking for, you’re better off with Trader Joe’s take on orange chicken. However, if speed is a factor, than this PF Chang’s bowl will do okay in a pinch.
To learn more about the cooking instructions, ingredients, or nutrition content for this PF Chang’s chicken and rice bowl, check out our package scans below.
