Saffron Road Vegetable Pad Thai

Ah, the frozen dinner, the penultimate lazy meal! For a blog focussing on lazy eats, is this really the first time I'm reviewing a frozen meal? Sure looks like it. And it's not an Amy's meal even! But fret not, many Amy's dinners are sure to show up here, for now we'll be looking at this pad thai from Saffron Road. Though Amy's does have their own pad thai frozen meal, currently sitting in my freezer even as I type! So just how good is this Saffron Road version? Let's find out!

Buying. I have to admit, I don't entirely remember where I bought this. Saffron Road is one of those odd brands that seems to be one that a lot of people don't really know, but I can seem to find their frozen entrees almost everywhere I go that has a freezer section & normally carries a good selection of "natural" foods, I've even found them at Grocery Outlet. Around $4-5 seems to be the typical going price for these.

You can even buy a case of these from Amazon, but it's rather cost prohibitive (with shipping they come out to almost $9 per entree) and not worth it in my opinion.

Unboxed meal & cooking instructions

Packaging & Prep. The packaging is pretty standard for a microwave meal. Within the cardboard outer packaging, the food is in a plastic tray with a plastic film cover.

On the back of the box, it gives you two options for heating up the meal, microwave or oven. What I want to know is, who on earth buys meals like this to only prep them in the oven?? I certainly don't want to wait almost an hour to eat what's supposed to be a quick & easy meal! Needless to say, I opted the microwave route. I honestly feel like the microwave directions had too many steps, but it got the job done alright, my food ended up neither over cooked or still frozen in the middle.

Ingredients & Nutrition panels

Nutrition. This tiny meal clocks in at 440 calories, which is a bit steep, but could be much worse considering that this is Pad Thai afterall. We've got a whole 11g of fat, and it looks like most of that is coming from peanut butter and then the tofu, there is some canola oil in here, but it's in the 2% or less category. Only 1.5g are saturated, not ideal but acceptable.

Sodium comes in at 590mg, ouch! A bit steep to be sure, but par for the course when it comes to convenience foods like this.

This meal contains a respectable 4g of fiber which is always good, probably from all the whole veggies it has. But it also has 18g of sugar, no bueno! This should come as to no surprise with sugar being the first ingredient in the sauce.

This little meal also gets you 13g of protein, not bad! Go go tofu!

Overall, this meal may be better than other options out there, but it's just not very healthful.

Nom. So how does it taste? Decent. For all the sodium it has in it, it honestly tastes a little bland. The noodles are pretty good though for a frozen meal, they didn't get overly dry/crunchy and they didn't get too mushy either. I really like the tofu strips, they had a good chewy texture without being rubbery. The sauce had a bit of tangy-ness to it but just not enough flavor overall. It does have a little bit of heat, the front of the package does rate it as "medium". I would say that does taste a little like pad thai, it certainly wasn't bad per se, but I have had much better frozen pad thai before (and worse, for that matter). Of course, no frozen pad thai compares to getting some freshly made in a Thai restaurant, just gotta get them to hold the nam pla, meat and eggs!

Bottom Line. Saffron Road's website. Keep in mind that while this brand has many vegan offerings, they are not a vegan or even vegetarian company. They do make a variety of other kinds of products than frozen meals as well. They're pretty good at marking what's vegan and many of their products are also certified gluten free, including this vegetable pad thai.

I enjoyed this enough that I do look forward to trying their other vegan offerings. But I don't think I would necessarily buy their vegetable pad thai again unless I find it on sale.