The premise of Freezer Meal Frenzy is that we’re a frozen food review site. That means that anything that you’d find in the freezer aisle of your local grocery store is fair game for our review team. However, that doesn’t mean this is a hard rule — we do occasionally stride outside the coldest of all grocery aisles from time to time to check out other options by some of our favorite brands.
For example, we’ve reviewed Devour’s dry mac and cheese because we’re such big fans of their frozen meals. We’ve also reviewed Annie’s boxed mac and cheese so we could compare it against their frozen options. And we’ll always go out of our way to check out the TJ’s refrigerated burritos, because there are some real tasty items in that line.
In fact, we were scoping out the refrigerated section at our local Trader Joe’s to see if there were any new burritos just the other day. There weren’t any, but that’s when we stumbled upon the Trader Joe’s Cornbread Stuffing. We’re pretty sure this is a limited-time holiday item, so we definitely wanted to give it a try before it goes away. So that’s what we’re reviewing today. We promise that we’ll go back to frozen food tomorrow (in fact, we’ll probably check out another frozen pizza); you’ll just have to forgive us for being a bunch of Curious Georges here at Freezer Meal Frenzy.
Anyway, heating this is pretty simple, and there are a couple options available to you. You can either cook this in the conventional oven, or the microwave. We were really tempted by that short cook time, but we ended up saying, “What the hey? Let’s go all out.” We cooked our stuffing in the oven today. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions for both methods, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
First off, we have to say that cooking this in the oven was definitely the right choice. It comes out moist, but not soggy, which is the perfect consistency for stuffing. We can’t say for certain that this would get soggy in the microwave, since we didn’t try that, but we can’t help but suspect that it would. We did give ours a couple extra minutes of cook time, and we think that you could cook it for even longer than that if you’re really interested in a stuffing that has a thin layer of crisp on the outside.
This is a pretty traditional stuffing, all things considered. It contains cranberries and apples to cover the sweet end of the spectrum, and bread and herbs to cover the savory side.
Where this differs from your familiar holiday favorite, however, is that it uses cornbread instead of a classic whitebread. Honestly, this doesn’t change things all that much, as the fruit and herbs really do a lot of the talking. At the same time, there is a subtle cornbread undertone to this, which reminds us a little bit of a corn tortilla more than a proper corn bread.
So if you’re in this for the cornbread, you might be a little disappointed by how subtle that flavor is. If you’re just looking for a rich stuffing, though, you’ll probably find a lot to love here.
If you take a quick glance at the back of the package, you’ll see the very reasonable 160 calories and semi-reasonable 490 mg of sodium. However, if you look more closely, you’ll realize that this is for 1/5 of the package. So if you eat the full package in a sitting, you’re up to 800 calories and 2,450 mg of sodium. Then again, this is intended to be a side dish, not a full meal, so it’s probably okay to eat a smaller portion. Besides, it’s the holidays. The time for feasting is upon us!
The Trader Joe’s Cornbread Stuffing is a pretty tasty stuffing that’s designed to please stuffing aficionados rather than cornbread true believers. It’s a good thing to serve as a side for a greater holiday meal, though we doubt you’ll want to make a meal of just the stuffing. You hypothetically could, but that’s not really what stuffing is designed for.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen stuffing, check out the package scan below.
