InnovAsian Cuisine’s frozen foods tend to be incredibly inconsistent. While some of their foods are among the best we’ve had (like their Chicken Egg Rolls), others are depressingly mediocre (like their Sweet & Sour Chicken). And even their bowls are hit or miss. The Chicken Fried Rice Bowl is better tasting than their standard Chicken Fried Rice, yet the General Tso’s Chicken Rice Bowl is a pale imitation of their standard General Tso’s Chicken (which is amazing).
So you can see why we approached the InnovAsian Teriyaki Chicken Rice Bowl with some hesitation. There were a wide range of open possibilities about how such a dish would end up tasting. So we put on our brave-taster pants and cracked open a box of the stuff to find out what it was all about. For science.
This frozen meal is super easy to cook. Just pop it into the microwave for three minutes and 30 seconds and you’re ready to rock.
First of all, the chicken here is fantastic. It has a melt-in-your-mouth consistency that is so rare for frozen chicken. It also tastes amazing. Part of that is the high-quality chicken, but it’s also partially due to the teriyaki sauce. Yes, this is some very good sauce, and it impacts every single bite of this meal. Of course, it has the biggest impact on the chicken, and that’s a very, very good thing.
There are also some pineapple chunks, and they sweeten up the teriyaki sauce a bit, giving the whole dish a lovely citrusy flavor.
There’s a blend of veggies tossed into this dish, and they range from decent to impressive. The baby corn is probably the best veggie in here, though it’s also the veggie we found the least of. The snow peas are pretty good, the broccoli tastes fresh, and the red bell peppers are really just there for color as far as we can tell. We have no complaints about the veggies (aside from the stingy portion of baby corn).
And then there’s the rice. This rice is nothing special on its own — it’s your standard white rice — but the teriyaki sauce really sweetens the deal. We also found some scrambled egg in the mix, which we didn’t expect at all, and we tend to really love scrambled egg in our rice dishes.
One bowl of this stuff contains about 330 calories (and only 15 from fat), which really isn’t bad. It’s not exactly a diet food, but it’s also not a calorie-loaded diet-stomper either. And it’s definitely on the lighter end of that spectrum. The sodium is pretty high, though. At 970 mg, this meal’s sodium level is no joke. That’s high even for a frozen food.
The InnovAsian Teriyaki Chicken Rice Bowl is quite good. We were admittedly a little nervous about this frozen food, but this meal for one ended up winning us over.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this InnovAsian Cuisine rice bowl, check out our package scan below.
