The concept behind the PF Chang’s Home Menu line is to deliver PF Chang’s-quality food in a frozen version that you can make at home. While this is a noble goal, it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, it leads to food that’s just kind of mediocre, though once in a while PF Chang’s Home Menu delivers a fantastic frozen food.
So it’s always with a little hesitation, and a heart filled with dampened hope, that we approach anything from this line. That’s true today, as we check out the PF Chang’s Home Menu Sesame Chicken, which comes in a multi-serve bag.
This isn’t a microwavable meal, so prepare to bust out the ol’ skillet. Even so, this frozen food is really simple to cook. All you need to do is heat your skillet, dump the food into it, toss a cover on top of it all, and let it cook for a few minutes. It’s really easy. (To see the full cooking instructions, check out the package scans at the bottom of this article.)
After that simple cooking process, you’ll end up with a heap of sesame chicken, like the one pictured below.
Now, this isn’t exactly a full meal — it seems like it was designed to be served over a nice fried rice or perhaps a dish of noodles. What’s here is chunks of tender chicken, pieces of cauliflower, and a few additional veggies (bell peppers, broccoli, etc.) covered in a sesame sauce. It’s not especially complex, but it really doesn’t need to be.
The chicken is really good. It’s soft and rich, and it soaks up the sesame sauce (which is great) really well. This chicken is pretty much the perfect consistency — it’s not dry or soggy, and it’s satisfying to bite into.
Of course, this dish is weighted really heavily toward the cauliflower portion. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing (we do eat a lot of cauliflower here at Freezer Meal Frenzy), it’s just not very good here. Part of that is because the cauliflower portion is almost the exact same color as the chicken. Unless you inspect each bite before you take it, you’re not quite sure which of these two things you’re going to get. The chicken is fantastic and the cauliflower is just so-so, therefore whenever you expect chicken and take a bite of cauliflower, you can’t help but feel a bit let down.
According to the package, there are “about 2 servings” in a bag, though a serving is slightly less than half a bag. If you stick with the recommended serving, you’ll be taking in 230 calories and 800 mg of sodium, but if you down the entire bag, that becomes 490 calories and 1,730 mg of sodium. When you pair this with a rice or noodle dish, you can probably end up eating the recommended serving, but if you eat this on its own, you could easily finish off the entire bag in a sitting.
The PF Chang’s Home Menu Sesame Chicken pairs some really great chicken with a decent sauce and some mediocre veggies. If the whole thing were as good as the chicken, this would be a knockout dish. As is, it’s just kind of alright, and there are better ways to get a high-quality sesame chicken than sifting through this frozen meal to find it.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
