Perdue General Tso's Chicken

This is a new product that I have recently spotted at the local Associated food mart in my area. Since I am familiar with Perdue's frozen wings selection from the Costco, it was a sound decision for me to try out this promising new addition to the Associated freezer isle. The frozen bag meals are steadily gaining popularity within food marts and supermarkets, and there is a handul number of manufacturer's that are fighting over the shelf space to put their products on for consumer consumption/purchases. The first thing that I have noted on the packaging is the glazed chicken bits over rice, but further packaging inspection assured me that this is just a mere serving suggestion and that the inner hold of the packaging contains only the glazed chicken.

This marquee graphic on the front side of the packagaing was very promising, with the Asian-styled text and bold red background.

As you can see, the bag contains only 26 ounces of glazed chicken: just under 2 pounds of the product. And the price for this is $9.99; a whopping $6.17 or so per pound. This is pretty much a $4.00 increase over frozen meal-in-bags from other manufacturer that serve 2 people.

Back of the packaging. Note the serving suggestions.

Bag-O'-Vision of Genereal Tso's Glazed Chicken by Perdue.

Frozen bits/pieces of Genereal Tso's Glazed Chicken by Perdue.

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Cooked/microwaved bits/pieces of Genereal Tso's Glazed Chicken by Perdue.

Close-up of the glazed chicken pieces. Note how some of them are darker due to glaze and being better cooked/done than the lighter pieces with less glaze.

I dont know if I mentioned this or not but I really hate white rice, the kind that you get free most of the time at the Chinese joint, the same kind that is popular all-over the world. I am just not into steamy rice; I like it nicely fried until it reached the rich yellow color.

I figured that the frozen General Tso's Glazed Chicken would be an excellent dish if it would go over a bed of Roasted Pork Fried Rice from the local Chinese joint, and I was right. The serving suggestion from the back of the packaging suggested a similar serving approach, but the Roasted Pork seemed liked a better solution per personal preference.
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Close-up shot of the tasty rice and glazed chicken goodness.

Here is the section shot of the glazed chicken piece. As you can see it has real chicken (breast meat) inside, but I think that it would be better if Perdue would go with thigh meat instead of lean breast meat. Another improvement to this product would be if Perdue would add like a pack or even several packs of sauce to put on the meat once it has been heated, because the sauce/glaze that the meat is glazed with, gets evaporated when you heat the stuff up and gets kind of dry externally. After trying out the 1st portion of this glazed chicken, I was a bit not sure what to write about it, but later on after I finished the whole bag, I found out that you just gotta heat it up for a right amount of time. In my case this was 4 minutes and 30 seconds for about 12-14 pieces of glazed chicken. When it cooks right it pretty much tastes right: well thermally treated, not dry and well-balanced in terms of meat-breading-glaze taste. I rate this General Tso's Glazed Chicken at 4.0/5.0 and the value rating is 2.5/5.0; the price of $9.99 for just over 1 and 1/2 pounds of product is just not a good value, in fact there is no value here. But if you live far away from a Chinese restaurant joint or just have a crave of Gen Tso's chicken at 3 or 4AM then having a bag of this stuff in the freezer is a nice solution for this kind of problem. It certainly worth giving it a try, but they don't sell this stuff in most food marts in Brooklyn area.