Chicken strips are great, and Tyson makes some of the best frozen chicken options out there. So today we’re pretty excited to be checking out the Tyson Fully Cooked Honey BBQ Flavored Chicken Strips.
You can heat these in the microwave if you’d like, but we opted for the oven. It’s a pretty simple process that just requires a baking sheet and 20 minutes of cook time. (You can read the full cooking instructions at the bottom of this review.)
The first thing we noticed about these chicken strips is that they come in some unusual shapes. We had an S-shaped one, a twisty one, and one that looked like the number 7. (We really don’t want to point out that there’s an oddly fecal quality to these shapes as well…)
The chicken itself is up to the usual Tyson quality. It’s juicy and the breading has a lovely texture. This is exactly what we expect from a bag of Tyson chicken. The BBQ sauce, however, has some issues.
First off, the sauce portion is skimpy. It’s enough to coat every piece in a sticky brown layer, but it’s not enough that the honey BBQ flavor stands out all that much.
Perhaps this isn’t the worst thing in the world, since it also doesn’t taste very good. Instead of the sweet, pleasant flavor we’d expect from a nice honey BBQ sauce, this stuff tastes kind of burnt. This is an unfortunate flavor that brings down the overall quality of the chicken by a decent margin. Of course, you can mitigate this a bit with a dollop of ranch dressing, but even that isn’t enough to salvage this chicken completely.
One thing readers might suspect is that maybe our bag had just been sitting in the freezer for too long. This probably wouldn’t lead to a burnt flavor, but it might lead to at least some weird-tasting food if it sat too long. However, we want to point out that this is definitely not the case. We had this chicken in our freezer for less than a week before we cooked and reviewed it. Additionally, user reviews on Tyson’s website are pointing out this burnt quality as well. It’s not just us. Something is up with this chicken!
The package considers 3 oz. to be a serving size. If you’re not sure how much that is, it’s about 1/8 the bag, or a single chicken strip. That’s not a lot. Just one serving (about one chicken strip) contains 200 calories (80 from fat) and 580 mg of sodium. Clearly, this is not a food meant for dieters.
The Tyson Fully Cooked Honey BBQ Flavored Chicken Strips are kind of a letdown. This was unexpected, since Tyson usually produces a really high-quality product. In fact, if you want an excellent substitute for these chicken strips, Tyson makes one: the Tyson Any’tizers Honey BBQ Flavored Boneless Chicken Bites. We recommend those for anyone who’s as disappointed by these strips as we are.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen chicken strips, check out our package scans below.
