Trader Joe’s offers an excellent selection of frozen burgers. We’re quite fond of their turkey burgers, in fact. Today, however, we’re steering toward the vegetarian-friendly side of this lineup to check out the Trader Joe’s Thai Sweet Chili Veggie Burgers.
After doing a bit of Googling, it turns out these might actually be repackaged Dr. Pareger’s burgers. We’ve reviewed some of Dr. Praeger’s veggie burgers in the past, but we actually haven’t tried their Thai Veggie Burgers, so we can’t be 100% certain if this is the case or not.
These come four in a box. Now, we didn’t order ours on Amazon — we just walked into a Trader Joe’s store and found these in the freezer section — but we noticed that the Amazon listing claims there are six patties in a box. This is incorrect; there are four patties per box. We hope Amazon fixes that information before someone orders these and ends up really disappointed!
Each patty is individually wrapped, which means these won’t end up sticking together in the freezer. It’s a nice touch that we wish more frozen burger makers would be willing to implement.
There are several ways to cook these, but we just fried ours in a pan. We used about a tablespoon of grapeseed oil in a hot pan, then carefully placed the burger in the pan. Note that these are pretty crumbly — they definitely don’t hold their form like traditional burgers would. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
These patties are made from rice, carrots, onions, bell peppers, water chestnuts, mushrooms, and more. That means they taste more like a rice bowl than like burgers. In fact, these remind us a bit of bibimbap. You’ll want to keep that in mind as you’re picking out toppings.
Speaking of toppings, we decided to use a wheat bun, then we added romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and honey mustard. This combination was absolutely perfect, though we could also see fried mushrooms and caramelized onions being great additions as well. We think your standard ketchup, mustard, and cheddar combo wouldn’t work all that well here. This just doesn’t have that charbroiled beef (or faux beef) flavor that makes those other toppings really shine.
A single patty contains 170 calories and 320 mg of sodium. Neither of those numbers is bad, but keep in mind that any toppings you add will cause these numbers to swell. Plus, you might be tempted to eat more than one burger because they’re very tasty!
The Trader Joe’s Thai Sweet Chili Veggie Burger is a great veggie burger if you’re looking for something less traditional. These don’t attempt to mimic the taste or feel of beef burgers; instead, they offer something that’s pretty nifty and delicious. We really like these, and we can see them easily becoming a regular part of our lunchtime rotation.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen veggie burgers, check out our package scans below.
