With the world opening back up after the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps it’s a good time to go to a PF Chang’s restaurant and enjoy some delicious food. If you’re still not ready to come out of lockdown, or if you simply don’t have a PF Chang’s nearby, there is an easy alternative: the PF Chang’s Home Menu line of frozen meals.
We’ve been tasting what they’ve been making, and today we’re excited to dive headfirst into the PF Chang’s Home Menu Korean BBQ Style Chicken. No, we will not be literally diving into this meal, but we will be eating some of it!
We should point out here that this is not to be confused with the Korean Style BBQ Chicken, which is a different meal whose title features the same words (though in a different order). That version has some veggies in it; the version we’re trying today is just chicken.
This needs to be cooked on a skillet rather than microwaved, but it’s pretty easy. Just cut open the bag, dump the contents into a hot skillet, and heat covered for about six minutes. Whip off the cover, then continue to cook while stirring for a few more minutes. It’s not quite as easy as a microwaveable meal, but we certainly wouldn’t call this difficult to make. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the bag, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
First off, let’s say right away that this is a very simple dish. We mentioned earlier that the other (similarly named) version of this dish contains veggies, but this one is just straight-up chicken with sauce. You could serve it over a good rice if you’d like, but for the sake of this review we just ate ours plain.
The true flavor-bringer of this dish is the sauce. It’s a Korean-style BBQ sauce with gochujang, and it’s super tasty. While this isn’t quite as sweet as some of the Korean BBQ we’ve had, it’s still definitely on the sweeter end of the BBQ spectrum. And it’s spicy too! Well, it’s not super spicy — it’s the kind of spicy that tickles your throat rather than makes your mouth feel like it’s on fire. It’s not exactly subtle, but it’s also not overbearing. With our Midwestern sensibilities, we’d rate this at a solid medium spice level.
The chicken isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as it needs to be. It ends up just a little bit rubbery around the edges, but the consistency everywhere else is fine. If it has a lot of natural flavor, we certainly didn’t pick up on it, but that’s mostly becasue the sauce is so potent here. The flavor of the chicken takes a backseat to the sauce, and that’s how it should be.
When you cook this, you’ll ultimately be left with some sauce that burns to the pan as the water content evaporates from the sauce. You can just toss that if you’d like, but we scraped just a little bit into our food and we really enjoyed that slightly charred flavor. It was a good contrast to the sweet BBQ sauce, and we think it managed to bring the whole thing together. It feels weird recommending the burnt part of a dish, but we really do think this is part of the experience of this particular meal!
There are supposedly two servings in a bag. If you eat a single serving, you’re going to be downing 460 calories and 1,120 mg of sodium. If you go all out and eat the full bag, you’re going to be up to 910 calories and 2,210 mg of sodium. And the contents of the full bag are a lot smaller than they seem. If you look at the picture a few paragraphs above this, you’ll see what the entire thing looks like in a serving dish. One person could easily eat all of this.
The PF Chang’s Home Menu Korean BBQ Style Chicken is a tasty chicken with a decent kick. While this is definitely meant to be served as part of a greater meal (you could add some rice or toss some veggies into the mix as you’re cooking this), it’s tasty enough to eat plain. Just be wary of that calorie count and sodium level — PF Chang’s really isn’t messing around here.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
