When you’re looking for takeout, but don’t actually want to do the “taking out” part, one of your alternative options is the PF Chang’s Home Menu line of frozen food. While these frozen appetizers and entrées certainly don’t match the quality of restaurant food, there are some pretty tasty items in the line. Today we’re checking out the PF Chang’s Home Menu Chicken Dumplings, which we’re pretty excited about.
Preparing these dumplings is a bit more work than your average frozen food. You’ll need to take out the sauce pack and thaw it separately.
While that is going on, you’ll need to throw some vegetable oil into a skillet and let it heat up before adding water. Now, you’ll need to be careful here, because adding water to boiling oil is a combo for disaster. When we tried it, oil and water splattered all over the place, which is exactly what we were expecting to happen (because science). Nevertheless, this is what the instructions say need to be done. If you want to avoid all of this, you can certainly try the microwave instructions, but we’re not sure how these would turn out when nuked. (To see the full cooking instructions, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Despite the effort (and we’ll be honest: this doesn’t take a ton of effort, just more than your average frozen appetizer), these actually come out pretty good. If you’ve followed the directions, the shells should be browned and slightly crispy on one side and soft and pale on the other, as shown in our image below.
Now, these are really satisfying to bite into. When you break through the soft shell, you’re treated to a tasty blend of chicken, scallions, and cabbage. The chicken here is a dark meat, which means it’s rich and juicy. The scallions add that sort of oniony flavor, which is great. We’re not a huge fan of cabbage, but it’s inoffensive here. Plus there’s a bit of sweetness to this, which is likely due to the addition of ginger and sugar.
What really drives this home, though, is the signature sauce. Don’t forget to thaw the sauce packet, because it really cranks up the taste of the dumplings, contrasting the subtle sweetness with a savory soy flavor.
The box claims that three dumplings is a serving, and that there should be about 2.5 servings per container. That means you should expect seven or eight dumplings per package, if our math is correct. The box says it contains “approximately 8,” while ours had “exactly 8.” Now, a serving of three might be alright if you’re eating these with a side of rice and some sort of protein, but when served on their own, you’ll easily plow through all eight and then wonder where they all went.
If you can manage to eat just three, you’re sitting pretty at 150 calories and 640 mg of sodium. If you do what we did and scarf down the entire box in a sitting, you’re looking at the much less sexy 410 calories and 1,690 mg of sodium. That’s more than just spare change…
The PF Chang’s Home Menu Chicken Dumplings are one of the better items in PF Chang’s frozen food line. We do recommend the skillet cooking method for these, despite it being messy and slightly dangerous. The end result is quite good.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these chicken dumplings, check out our package scans below.
Best brand I’ve eaten of frozen dumplings. Used them in Dynasty wonton soup broth and the soup was awesome.