We reviewed a few items from the Wicked Kitchen frozen food line back in 2018. And then the weirdest thing happened: All of the Wicked Kitchen items disappeared from the freezers at our local grocery store. We thought it was a bit odd, but we started to suspect that maybe this was just a flash-in-the-pan frozen food brand, and maybe we were lucky to have gotten to review any of their food at all.
And then, just the other day, we spotted the Wicked Kitchen Korean Inspired Bowl at our local co-op. “Well I’ll be darned,” we said. “It turns out, Wicked Kitchen is still kicking out frozen food after all.” So we did the only thing we could: We picked it up and brought it to the Freezer Meal Frenzy office to give it the old FMF taste test.
Oh, and we should point out that while we were doing some research, we also learned that Wicked Kitchen is making plant-based ice cream now too, so you’d better believe we’ve added this to our grocery list. We’d love to check that out sometime soon!
As for the Korean bowl that we’re reviewing today, this actually takes a decent chunk of time to cook up. You’ll need to remove the cardboard outer sleeve, then pop the tray into the microwave for five minutes. Pull it out, give it a quick stir, then pop it back in for another two minutes. That’s seven whole minutes of cook time — we’d expect that from maybe a Stouffer’s frozen meal, but we were surprised to find a meatless bowl with such a long cook time. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the cardboard sleeve, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
After all that cook time, though, you’re left with a meal that we found to be surprisingly satisfying.
First off, we really enjoy the consistency here. After the extensive cook time (and some additional time to cool), this ends up with a sticky quality that we’d expect from, say, a good bowl of bibimbap. That’s mostly due to the Korea-style miso sauce, which tastes excellent. It has a sweet taste with a slightly gingery bite to it, which we absolutely love.
Of course, it’s also respectably spicy. Eating this reminded us that we called the Wicked Kitchen Chorizo Mac & Cheese one of the spiciest dishes we’d ever tried. While this doesn’t fall into that category, it’s definitely got some kick. Sure, if you’re the sort of person who chomps down handfuls of ghost peppers like they’re Cheetos, then you’re not going to be impressed. But for traditional Midwesterners like ourselves, who have a fairly low spice tolerance, this sauce slapped our tongues pretty hard.
If you mix this well enough, that sauce permeates every corner of this meal, and that’s a very good thing. No matter how bland the jasmine rice might be, every grain soaks up enough sauce that it becomes a powerhouse of flavor.
Aside from the rice, you have a pretty basic combination of veggies: onions, cabbage, leeks, carrots, and red peppers. We even spotted a tiny little leaf of some sort of unidentifiable herb. We don’t know what this is, but we ate it and it tasted good.
The protein in this dish is actually a Beyond Meat “mince,” which really just means there are ground-beef-style chunks of some sort of vegetarian meat substitute. There weren’t any really large chunks of it in our dish, so it seems like it’s there more for the sake of texture than flavor (and as a way to stand on the shoulders of the giant that is the Beyond Meat brand).
This may be a vegetarian-friendly dish, but it’s not really a diet-friendly dish. With 500 calories and 1,320 mg of sodium, this is certainly not made for calorie-counters or sodium-reducers.
The Wicked Kitchen Korean Inspired Bowl is fantastic. Seriously, we were expecting something that was just alright, and what we found was an incredibly craveable Korean-style frozen dish. We’re really happy to return to the Wicked Kitchen brand, and we can’t wait to check out more of their frozen food.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scan below.
