Your basic frozen chicken comes in an astonishing amount of varieties. In fact, there are brands whose entire lineup is frozen chicken (such as Tyson). We’ll probably never run out of chicken to review. We’re fine with that, because we love the stuff.
Today we’re checking out the Trader Joe’s Breaded Chicken Tenderloin Breasts. We’ve recently reviewed the Chicken Drumellas, which were the more processed version of Trader Joe’s basic chicken nuggets, and we’re curious to see how all these chicken products compare against each other.
There are several different ways you can cook the Trader Joe’s Breaded Chicken Tenderloin Breasts. You could use the oven, the microwave, or even a deep fryer. We chose the oven, because it seemed like the best method of the three. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions for all three of these methods, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
We need to point out right away that we think we might have overcooked our chicken. As you can see in the image above, they ended up a bit darker in spots than they should be. The thing is, we didn’t cook these for as long as the package said to. We pulled ours out after about 23 minutes, when the package calls for 25. We think you could easily get away with 20 minutes as your cook time for this chicken.
Our breading ended up extremely crispy and a little dry. Again, we think this was probably due to us overcooking them, and if you use the microwave they’ll probably not be crispy at all. Still, if you want extra crispy chicken strips, it’s nice to know that you can heat these in the oven and you’ll probably get the desired result.
The meat inside the breading is fantastic. Chicken tenderloin is a white meat, but if you’d swear this was a dark meat — it’s just that flavorful. It’s also soft and juicy, even when the breading is cooked to a high level of crispiness. This is some tasty chicken.
There are a lot of different ways you could prepare these chicken breast chunks. You could serve them over rice, dump gravy on top of them, use them to build a sandwich, or chop them up and serve them as nuggets. And those are just a few of the endless options we could think of. For this batch, we actually dipped them in a little bit of tarter sauce, and that ended up being a great topper for these chicken strips.
The bag claims there are about a dozen pieces of chicken inside. If you don’t count the smaller pieces that broke off of the larger ones, our package had exactly twelve. One piece is supposedly a serving, but we think you’ll eat more than one, no matter how you serve them. Every piece contains about 130 calories (35 from fat) and 220 mg of sodium, so eating two pieces seems like a good amount if you’re being conscious about calories. If you eat more than that — or if you serve these as part of a greater dish — be warned that the calories start to add up really fast.
The Trader Joe’s Breaded Chicken Tenderloin Breasts are really great, though they get a little too crispy if you cook them for too long. We actually think the microwave might be a viable option here if you want your breading to be softer and not so dry. But no matter how you like your breading, it’s hard to deny that the meat inside is phenomenal.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these breaded chicken breast pieces, check out our package scans below. (We apologize for the quality!)
