We started a little experiment in summer of 2021 where we were going to taste as much of Bibigo’s frozen food as possible. Our early results from this experiment were pretty positive — Bibigo is doing some decent stuff — but we kind of fell off the project after hitting just a few of their frozen meals and finding them to be pretty good rather than pretty amazing.
But we figured we owe it to ourselves (and to our readers) to keep pushing forward with this project. So today we return to the Bibigo brand as we check out the Bibigo Korean Style Crunchy Chicken with Sweet & Spicy Sauce.
First up, we must cook this. The package gives instructions for conventional oven, toaster oven, and air fryer. Since we don’t have an air fryer in the Freezer Meal Frenzy office (this is something we really need to rectify someday), we decided to go with the traditional oven here. It’s pretty easy to cook, though there is a separate sauce packet that needs to be thawed, and it will take about 20 minutes to cook this. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
We should point out right away that this stuff is super crunchy. Yes, the word “Crunchy” is right there in the title, but this was a little more than we were expecting. Now, the way this works out is that the bigger pieces of chicken end up with a lovely crunch to them while maintaining a soft interior. The smaller pieces, however, end up crunchy all the way through. We even tried to mitigate this a bit by taking our food out of the oven a few minutes early, and we still found the small pieces of chicken to be really hard. This wouldn’t be a super huge problem if most of the chicken was in larger pieces, but as you can see from the image above, that’s not the case.
And this affects the flavor too. The smaller pieces of chicken end up a little bit burnt-tasting, while the bigger pieces end up tasting lovely. The good news is that this sauce is actually really tasty. We would have liked there to be just a tad more of it, as some of our chicken ended up not fully coated, but what’s here is great. It has a subtly sweet flavor, with enough of a kick that our sinuses were clearing out as we were eating this. We doubt this will satisfy the truly spice-obsessed, but for our midwestern sensibilities, we found this to be a satisfying level of spiciness.
This might seem like a fairly low-calorie meal if you don’t look too closely. The box claims that a serving contains 320 calories and 590 mg of sodium. However, there are 3.5 servings in this package. That means that if you gobble down the full box in a sitting, you’re up to 1,120 calories and a whopping 2,065 mg of sodium.
Now, to be fair, we do think you could get two meals out of the amount of food in a box. But even if you split this in half, you’re looking at 560 calories and more than 1,000 mg of sodium. Be careful with this one, folks!
The Bibigo Korean Style Crunchy Chicken with Sweet & Spicy Sauce is pretty alright, though we do wish there was more sauce and fewer small pieces of overly hard chicken in the mix. This is a meal that has some serious potential, but we don’t think it quite nails what it’s going for.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen chicken, check out our package scans below.
