On the spectrum of Asian-style rice dishes that you’ll find in the freezer aisle, the Tai Pei brand is going to lean on the cheaper, lower quality side. It’s not that their meals are terrible; it’s just that they don’t really have the chops to compete against staples like the PF Chang’s Home Menu line or a lot of the fried rice options at Trader Joe’s.
But that’s okay. Not every brand needs to serve the gourmet niche. To fill in the “better” section of the “good, better, best” hierarchy, you’ve got brands like Tai Pei. These dishes are going to be better than something like, say, a Smart Ones rice bowl, but they very much stay out of the “best” lane, where companies like Ling Ling like to drive.
Of course, we knew all of this going into the Tai Pei Beef & Broccoli. So we really weren’t surprised to find another not-great-but-not-terrible option from the fine folks at Tai Pei. So let’s dig into the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Tai Pei Beef & Broccoli.
First off, cooking this is easy as can be. Remove the tamper-proof seal around the top of the lid, then put the whole carton in the microwave for four and a half minutes. That’s all there is to it. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the carton, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
As you can see, while this cooks, the food portion shrinks down considerably, leaving a pretty huge portion of the carton empty. It also looks kind of gross, at first glance. If you want to, you can dump the contents into a serving dish, which is exactly what we did. That will give you a better look at what’s actually inside this frozen meal.
That horribly green and swampy look goes away once you dump this into a proper serving dish and stir it up a bit. Which is good — we can’t imagine having to eat the slimy mess we saw when we first popped the lid off.
And really, this stuff has a decent flavor. That’s mostly because of the sauce — this comes slathered up with an “Asian style sauce” (as the text on the carton proclaims) that’s actually pretty sweet. It causes the rice to sort of clump together, because this stuff is super sticky, but it does have a pleasant flavor that brings the dish together.
Now, for a dish that has the word Beef in the title, this thing really skimps on the beef portion. Then again, that’s not really a bad thing, because this beef is pretty terrible. It’s tough to chew through, and the only flavor it really has comes from that sauce. There are subtle hints of beef flavor trying to eek their way out, but those are fleeting, replaced too soon by the sweetness of the sauce. Oh, beef flavor, we hardly knew ye.
The broccoli looks pretty rough for wear, and it’s really not going to win any awards. It looks like the life’s been leeched out of it by the reheating process, and that’s exactly how it tastes. It’s also kind of soggy. Any refreshing crisp this broccoli might have had has been lost to time.
However, that rice and sauce combo really do cover up this meal’s gravest sins, to the point where we found ourselves actually enjoying it. It’s definitely not the best rice dish we’ve ever had, but it has a decent amount of flavor.
This meal contains 380 calories (100 from fat) and 810 mg of fat. Both of those numbers are slightly higher than we would have liked, but neither one of them is offensive. This frozen meal is just slightly less healthy than would be ideal.
From the Tai Pei Beef & Broccoli, we expected something that was pretty middle-of-the-road, and that’s exactly what we got. We doubt this meal is going to make any Tai Pei true believers out of the frozen food skeptics out there, but it tastes pretty alright, all things considered.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen rice dish, check out our package scans below.
