Hit-or-Miss with Heat-and-Eat
In my previous blog I remarked that buying heat-and-eat meals is a hit-or-miss proposition. The teriyaki chicken we bought recently at Costco was a hit. But we knew we were taking a risk with it as more than half of the heat-and-eat, or RTE (ready to eat), meals we've tried have been disappointments. That's true even for those bought at stores well reputed for tasty RTE foods, such as Costco and Trader Joe's.
Why so many misses? More than half the meals we've tried have failed on one of three stumbling blocks:
1) The food doesn't even look good / AKA, the package is a lie. Sometimes heat-and-eat meals don't even look good when they come out of the package. That was the case with chicken parmigiana I bought at Trader Joe's.
The sad food inside the box looked nothing like the attractive picture on the outside. It didn't taste much better, either.
The teriyaki chicken we made this week passed this test with flying colors. The food that landed on the plate looked believably like the picture on the box.
2) The food just doesn't taste that good. Many times with these packaged meals we're left shaking our heads, agreeing "We could make better than this on our own." See, for example, the Costco lasagna we tried. That one wasn't bad; it was just clear it wasn't as good as what I could make at home. This teriyaki chicken was better than anything we could make without significantly greater effort. Though maybe I could buy a good teriyaki sauce in a jar like I did when I made General Tso's chicken....
3) Finally, with heat-and-eat meals there's always a question of value. How much more are you paying for the convenience vs. buying ingredients? A Costco BBQ beef "burnt ends" we tried several months ago failed on that score. The meat was tasty but the package was almost 1/2 sauce by weight. At $12/pound for the package, that pushed the price of the meat portion to nearly $20/pound. Not worth buying again.
Out of curiosity I weighed the chicken in this package when I shook the sauce off it.... The package had a net weight of 3 pounds, the chicken was 1.9 pounds. More than 1/3 sauce is not ideal but at $15 for the package overall, subtracting about $3 of value for the sauce leaves us paying about $6/pound for the meat. For seasoned and cooked meat, that's reasonable.
[This entry was cross-posted from https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/70283.html. Please comment there using OpenID. That's where most of the action is!]
Why so many misses? More than half the meals we've tried have failed on one of three stumbling blocks:
1) The food doesn't even look good / AKA, the package is a lie. Sometimes heat-and-eat meals don't even look good when they come out of the package. That was the case with chicken parmigiana I bought at Trader Joe's.
The sad food inside the box looked nothing like the attractive picture on the outside. It didn't taste much better, either.
The teriyaki chicken we made this week passed this test with flying colors. The food that landed on the plate looked believably like the picture on the box.
2) The food just doesn't taste that good. Many times with these packaged meals we're left shaking our heads, agreeing "We could make better than this on our own." See, for example, the Costco lasagna we tried. That one wasn't bad; it was just clear it wasn't as good as what I could make at home. This teriyaki chicken was better than anything we could make without significantly greater effort. Though maybe I could buy a good teriyaki sauce in a jar like I did when I made General Tso's chicken....
3) Finally, with heat-and-eat meals there's always a question of value. How much more are you paying for the convenience vs. buying ingredients? A Costco BBQ beef "burnt ends" we tried several months ago failed on that score. The meat was tasty but the package was almost 1/2 sauce by weight. At $12/pound for the package, that pushed the price of the meat portion to nearly $20/pound. Not worth buying again.
Out of curiosity I weighed the chicken in this package when I shook the sauce off it.... The package had a net weight of 3 pounds, the chicken was 1.9 pounds. More than 1/3 sauce is not ideal but at $15 for the package overall, subtracting about $3 of value for the sauce leaves us paying about $6/pound for the meat. For seasoned and cooked meat, that's reasonable.
[This entry was cross-posted from https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/70283.html. Please comment there using OpenID. That's where most of the action is!]