InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken Review

InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken

It must be really difficult to make a good frozen Asian food. Perhaps that’s why we find so little of it that we like (despite the fact that we love great Chinese and Japanese cuisine). So the InnovAsian Cuisine brand has been something of a godsend for us. Their high-quality frozen foods are almost always a treat.

Unfortunately, the InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken just isn’t up to the typical InnovAsian high standard. It’s not that it’s bad; it’s just not the best meal in the InnovAsian lineup (that honor might go to the Chicken Egg Rolls).

Having had InnovAsian’s chicken products in the past, we were actually surprised that the instructions on the box had us cook this in the oven rather than on a stovetop. (Even stranger, the instructions on our box were different than the ones given on InnovAsian’s website — we went with the box instructions.) We preheated the oven to 375 degrees fahrenheit, then stuck the chicken on a pan and cooked for about 15 minutes.

InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken

You’ll notice this also comes with a sauce packet that needs to be thawed. You can toss that into some warm water and leave it sit while the chicken is cooking. After 15 minutes in the oven, cut open the sauce packet and mix with the chicken. Then cook for about 5 more minutes.

We found the chicken itself to be a bit too hard for our liking. We understand that sweet and sour chicken often has a crispy outside, but this actually feels difficult to chew through. The flavor of the chicken isn’t also great. It’s a bit dull, and it has a buttery aftertaste to it.

InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken

Now, to be fair, we did have plenty of chicken left over, so we reheated some of it later in the week and found that 48 hours in the refrigerator really did this chicken good. The hardness just wasn’t a problem for us anymore.

The sauce, however, is the real life-saver. Dear god, this sauce is amazing. While we do wish the chicken was of a higher quality, we’re definitely willing to forgive it because the sauce really helps to redeem it.

Now, this is really just the protein portion of a greater dish, so we tried it with some InnovAsian Chicken Fried Rice. The two ended up being a pretty great pair, though we suspect a white rice is closer to what would have been expected from InnovAsian. Of course, if you’re still hungry you could add some egg rolls (which, as we mentioned earlier, InnovAsian also makes).

InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken

One package is supposedly three servings, though we think this is probably closer to two. One serving contains about 390 calories (100 from fat), so a full package has 1,170 calories (300 from fat), and a half box has 585 (150 from fat).  And then there’s the sodium. While a serving only has 440 mg, a full box has 1,320 mg, and a half box has 660 mg. No matter how you slice it, this is no diet food.

Then again, the box claims there’s no MSG or trans fat in this meal, so that’s a huge plus.

The InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken isn’t as good as we hoped it would be. That said, the sauce is fantastic, and this does go well with many of InnovAsian’s other frozen foods. Still, this doesn’t hold a candle to InnovAsian’s General Tso’s Chicken, which is downright amazing.

To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken, check out our package scan below.

InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken

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