Trader Joe’s Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat Review

Trader Joe's Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat

Okay, we know we’ve been gone for a while. We haven’t posted a review in months.

So here’s what happened. Our site owner was diagnosed with cancer toward the end of 2021. Regular readers will notice that ever since then, we’d been posting here and there, but were struggling to keep up a consistent schedule. The recovery was pretty brutal, but for those who are concerned, he pulled through and he’s doing pretty okay now. While he was regaining his stamina and lust for life, we tried to occasionally post something, just so our readers would know we were still thinking about frozen food.

When 2023 hit, we all just needed a mental health break after being forced to confront the fragile, fleeting nature of existence (cancer tends to bring up a lot of existential pondering). So we quit working and spent our days lounging in coffee shops, and our evenings in bars watching live music. We made tons of friends along the way, filling our lives with art, music, and good company. We really did live our best possible lives in the first portion of 2023.

But all good things must come to an end. We’ve burned through all our fat stacks of Freezer Meal Frenzy cash, and now it’s time to get back to work.

We’re kicking things off with something a little unconventional, though. Today we’re checking out the Trader Joe’s Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat. It’s not a frozen food, but it comes from our beloved Trader Joe’s, so we’re just going to roll with it.

As you can see, this comes with a basic salad, with croutons and Caesar dressing in separate packets. You’ll need to mix it all together yourself.

Trader Joe's Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat

This isn’t a big deal, since it’s super easy and it does prevent the croutons from becoming soggy.

Oh, and before we dig into this, we should point out that this item was recalled at one point back in 2022, because it contains undeclared egg. So if you have egg allergies, you’ll need to stay away from this. But TJ’s seems to have cleared up the issue, since they put the item back on store shelves.

Trader Joe's Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat

Anyway, we have to admit that this really isn’t anything groundbreaking or bone-shaking. It’s just a basic Caesar salad. That said, we do think it’s a pretty good one. The primary reason for that is due to the Caesar dressing, which we really think is fantastic. It has that super-rich flavor that means you’ll taste it even when there’s just a tiny little drop of it on a lettuce leaf.

The lettuce itself is crispy and fresh-tasting, though we do think it’s a little heavy on stems. That’s not unusual for Caesar salads, but we prefer the leafy side of lettuce to the stem part.

The croutons stay nice and crunchy, and they have a good bready flavor to them. However, they do contain tiny little grains of something that’s super hard, which got stuck in our teeth and sort of ruined the nice melt-in-your-mouth consistency of the croutons as a whole. This wasn’t a huge issue, but it did slow down our pursuit to munch a tasty salad as fast as possible.

The chicken meat is fine. It doesn’t have a ton of flavor — it is a white meat after all — but it does provide some extra protein to make this whole thing seem more filling.

As for calories, this is a reasonable meal, at just 440 calories per container. This is about 2.5 servings, if you believe the package, but we think you’ll chow through the whole thing in a sitting.

The Trader Joe’s Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat is a pretty decent Caesar salad. We don’t think we’ll go out of our way for it — there are way too many Caesar options pretty much everywhere we go — but we did appreciate getting to try this. If we have a Caesar craving while shopping at TJ’s, we could definitely see ourselves picking this up again in the future. But if we have that same craving while not at a TJ’s store, we’ll probably go somewhere else to satisfy it.

Trader Joe's Caesar Salad with White Chicken Meat
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