We’ve been slowly working our way through the Tai Pei line of Asian-inspired frozen food. These microwavable meals come in little cardboard containers that you can eat your food straight out of, for those who really don’t have a lot of time.
Today we’re trying yet another item from this line, the Tai Pei Pepper Beef. Some of Tai Pei’s other meals are available in multiple sizes, but this one appears to only come in the 10 oz. size. Obviously, that’s the one we’re digging into today.
This is pretty easy to heat. Peel the plastic from around the lid, then nuke the carton for four minutes. The package recommends that you let it cool for two more minutes before eating. (You can read the full cooking instructions by checking out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Like we said in the beginning of this review, you can eat this straight out of the carton if you’d like to. However, we always dump ours into a serving dish. That allows us to mix it a bit, which is good because Tai Pei always keeps the veggies and meat at the top of the dish, as you can see in the image above. It’s better once you mix it a bit.
The beef portion of this is remarkably school-lunch-like, which isn’t surprising, to be honest. What is surprising is that we still actually kind of like it. It’s soft and rubbery in some places, and gristly in others, but the flavor is halfway decent. And really, that’s what matters here.
The majority of the flavor, though, comes from the goop. The package calls it a black pepper sauce, but to us it’s just a glob of goop. It’s a glob of tasty goop, though. It sort of clumps up at one edge of the meal, so even after stirring, we weren’t able to get an even mix. But the bites of this meal that contained the all-powerful goop were quite lovely in a guilty-pleasure sort of way.
Even without the goop, though, the rice portion is actually pretty good. It’s a little bit greasy (which we expect from low-end fried rice), and it has a nice flavor to it. There are some veggies in the mix, but we found the peas to be the best of the bunch here. They just have such a satisfying consistency, and biting into one is an odd new form of pleasure.
The Tai Pei Pepper Beef is not a high-quality food, but we still really enjoy it. This is the sort of stuff we’d find ourselves enjoying at 2 a.m. while completely drunk rather than something we’d go out of our way for. But still, we appreciate Tai Pai’s attempts at being the Asian equivalent of El Monterey. This is low-quality guilty-pleasure food, and we really can’t hold that against it.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Tai Pei frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
