Trade Joe's Vegetable Burritos

Ah the ubiquitous frozen burrito, so often associated with the gas station convenience store and shrugged off as complete garbage as far as food goes. Vegan frozen burritos, even today aren't terribly common, and if you happen to find one, it's most likely Amy's. So for vegan burritos, we've gone from cheap garbage to something that's closer to real food and a lot more expensive to boot. Then we find this offering from Trader Joe's, how does it fare as far as frozen burritos go? Let's find out!

Buying. Obviously you have to go to Trader Joe's for this one. Find out if you have a location near you! If you don't, then I must offer my sympathies, they have a wide range of interesting vegan goodies to try!

I am pretty sure these are the same as Amy's black bean burritos, if not they are very similar. I really don't think I could tell them apart, which makes Trader Joe's version all the more appealing - they're so much cheaper! The Amy's burritos usually go for $2-3 each, while you can buy this package of two burritos for only $3.29! That's only about $1.65 per burrito! Still, they are more expensive than the convenience store versions, but I promise they're worth it (which could be based on the fact that no cheap-o vegan frozen burritos exist at all).

Packaging. Unlike virtually every other frozen burrito out there, these come in a two pack and they are in no way individually wrapped. They come in a cardboard tray, which looks suspiciously similar to the trays used in Amy's frozen dinners. Unless you're planning on eating both burritos at once, this puts you in the awkward position of figuring out how to store the second burrito. I opt to carefully open one end of the outer plastic wrapping, and clipping it shut with a BEVARA clip from Ikea (these clips are awesome!!). To save space in your freezer, you might want to ditch the cardboard tray too. The tray itself just seems a bit wasteful to me, I kinda feel like they could leave it out altogether.

Heating. The package offers two options for heating up your frozen burrito(s). I'm personally not interested in waiting over half an hour to cook a burrito, so to the microwave I went! I find it odd that they actually instruct you to wet down the burrito, but seeing how often I've had similar burritos get horribly dried out on the ends, I rolled with it. Getting burritos like these to heat right can be rather tricky since they are so dense; it's all too easy to have the ends overcooked and the center still frozen. Thankfully my burrito came out just fine.

Nutrition. Overall, the ingredients list looks pretty good, lots of whole plant ingredients. There are some processed ingredients like safflower oil and white rice flour, but nothing to get me too concerned, especially keeping in mind that frozen burritos are often completely junk.

Each burrito is 320 calories with about a third coming from fat. So that's 11g of fat, only 1g saturated, but the only real source of fat I see is the safflower oil, so that does concern me.

This burrito also has 400mg of sodium, not too terribly high, but not great either. I'll say it's acceptable. Getting 6g of fiber is pretty decent, fiber is always good! Sugars are 5g, and with no refined sugars on the label, I'm fine with this. Finally, we get 8g of protein, not too shabby!

On the whole, this is a reasonably healthy burrito, I would just prefer it with a little less oil.

Fresh from the microwave! Splitting/leaking is common problem.

Munch Time. It is a tasty burrito, but it does have some flaws. I would say the biggest flaw is that I would not recommend eating it by hand as the tortilla loves to tear and leak during the microwaving process. On the other hand, you could just go wet style with the puppy and drown it with a tasty sauce! It's a good way to turn a negative into a positive as far as I'm concerned.

The tortillas on these do tend to be a bit thin, but any thick and i'm afraid the ends where they're folded up would become dried out and inedible. The filling itself is very tasty. It's loaded with beans and other veggies, it's got a rich and flavorful tomato sauce, and thinness aside, the tortilla is mostly pretty tender except at the ends where some level of drying out is near impossible to avoid. On my burrito for testing, the ends were pleasantly crunchy and not horribly dried out.

cross section view

Bottom Line. I like these burritos, they're great to have on hand for a quick meal in a pinch. I love how they're so much more affordable than the Amy's version. Nutritionally they aren't half bad either. I've bought them many times before, and I plan on continuing buying them in the future. Although the black bean flavor isn't the only vegan burrito from Amy's, this is the only (frozen) vegan burrito to be found at Trader Joe's. I do understand that Trader Joe's has limited space to work with, and plenty of other vegan goodies, but I wish they could offer at least one other vegan burrito. Perhaps something unlike anything Amy's has to offer, that would be awesome!

I also want to point out that this burrito is an example of one of the many vegan offerings to be found at Trader Joe's that's not explicitly labelled as vegan. I love that they do have many of their vegan foods marked as such, but if something else catches your eye and isn't marked, it's probably worth a label read!