Anyone who enjoys Americanized Asian food is probably familiar with General Tso’s chicken. But are you familiar with General Chang’s chicken? We hadn’t heard of it until we recently picked up a bag of PF Chang’s Home Menu General Chang’s Chicken.
This discovery left us with some questions, of course. Who was General Chang? Was he even a general? Were he and General Tso rivals? Did they face each other upon some ancient battlefield? While we don’t have answers to any of these questions, we can at least talk about the pros and cons of this PF Chang’s frozen dish.
The bag has instructions for stovetop cooking, and they’re fairly simple. Simply heat up a skillet, add the contents of the bag, and let it cook for a bit. (You can read the full instructions by viewing the package scans at the bottom of this article.) It takes a bit longer than a microwavable meal would, but it’s not difficult.
There’s less chicken in this dish than we were expecting, as about half the contents of this dish are veggies. Most of the vegetable content is broccoli, but there are some red bell peppers mixed into this as well, as you can see in the image below.
The chicken portion is pretty alright. It’s soft and spongy, which isn’t ideal, but it’s to be expected from a dish like this. It is kind of gristly and fishy-tasting in places, and overall it’s just really inconsistent.
There’s an ample amount of sauce to cover up any failings of the chicken, or at least to reduce them to an acceptable level. That is to say this sauce is good enough to make up for the dish’s minor flaws. It has a strong, sweet flavor, and just a subtle hint of a spicy kick to it. And you certainly won’t run out of it, as the sauce portion is very generous.
The package claims that it contains two servings, but we’re pretty sure one person could eat the entire bag in a sitting. This is probably intended to go over some rice with a side of egg rolls or wontons or something, which makes the half-bag serving size a bit more appropriate.
If you consume half the bag, that puts you at about 370 calories and 930 mg of sodium, while eating the full bag brings you up to 750 calories and 1,900 mg of sodium. Obviously, the serving size is slightly less than a half bag, and also, a full bag is loaded with calories and sodium. If you decide to check out General Chang’s chicken for yourself, you might want to think real hard about this before going back for seconds.
The PF Chang’s Home Menu General Chang’s Chicken is tasty, but it’s also nothing special. The chicken portion is stingy and flawed, and the calorie count and sodium levels are way too high to justify a meal that’s not sublime. Still, this is an alright-tasting frozen version of General Tso — excuse us, we meant General Chang’s chicken.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this PF Chang’s chicken, check out our package scans below.
Thanks for the review! Wish I had seen it before I purchased… the “chicken” was inedible in my eyes. Not anything close to real chicken. More like chicken byproduct. I was so disappointed!