Marie Callender’s Sweet & Sour Chicken Review

Frozen sweet and sour chicken must be an incredibly difficult prospect, because we’ve rarely seen it done well. Even the better attempts, such as the Trader Joe’s Tempura Chicken with Sweet & Sour Sauce and the InnovAsian Sweet & Sour Chicken, can’t hold a candle to the stuff you’d get at an Asian restaurant, and many of the weaker attempts are downright failures.

So it’s with some hesitation that we approach the Marie Callender’s Sweet & Sour Chicken. We’ve tried enough frozen meals from Marie Callender’s to know they’re not among the higher-quality frozen food brands, and we don’t have a lot of faith that they have what it takes to make a good sweet and sour chicken dish. Of course, we’d love to be proven wrong.

This dish is simple enough to heat up. Simply pop it into the microwave for three minutes, stir the chicken and sauce portion, then pop it back in for about three more. That’s all there is to it. (To see the full cooking instructions, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)

Now, this is actually a decent-sized meal. We were surprised to see just how large the portion sizes were when we first opened the box. The tray is also segmented into sections, with the veggies in one compartment and everything else in the other.

First off, we need to congratulate Marie Callender’s here, as the sauce is surprisingly good. This is a cut above most of the other sweet and sour sauces we’ve tried here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. It has a nice sweetness, the flavor isn’t overbearing, and there’s no strange vinegar-y aftertaste (which has been a problem with some of the other sweet and sour dishes we’ve tried).

The chicken itself is nothing special — it’s made from white breast meat, and it doesn’t have a ton of flavor — but the sauce more than makes up for that. Additionally, the breading has a consistency that falls apart in your mouth, which makes this quite satisfying to eat.

The chicken is serves atop a bed of white rice, which is not that exciting. Of course, there’s enough sauce here to mix in with the rice, and you should definitely stir this all together. It’s much better that way.

The side dish here is a small tray of carrots and broccoli. We could have done without this part of the meal, to be honest. The carrots have a decent crunch to them, but they lack the rich flavor of your average cooked carrots. The broccoli is pretty decent, though. We’re actually glad that these components weren’t mixed into the rest of the dish, because the chicken portion is better without them.

This is no low-calorie meal. One dish of this stuff contains 500 calories, which puts it out of reach for dieters. It also contains 950 mg of sodium, which is pretty high even for a frozen meal. Of course, like we mentioned earlier, this is also a larger-than-average dish.

The Marie Callender’s Sweet & Sour Chicken is one of the better frozen sweet and sour dishes that we’ve tried. Take this with a grain of salt, because we haven’t had anything particularly great in this category, but we certainly weren’t expecting this level of quality from Marie Callender’s. This isn’t perfect, but it’s simply a great-tasting frozen meal with a somewhat mediocre side of veggies attached to it.

To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Marie Callender’s frozen meal, check out our package scans below.