The Super Bowl is approaching, so why not review one of the quintessential Super Bowl party foods by doing a chicken wings (sort of) review, albeit a veggie one? In past reviews, I have mixed reactions to MorningStar Farms products. While some of them taste good, usually their price is not worth the taste and/or portion size. Still, I'm willing to continue to try these out because eventually I'll run into one of these that is a must have and something that I'd buy, no matter what the price. So, on we go to the Veggie Buffalo Wings. First, I have a friend that has a very justified rant about how places call food items bonelss chicken tenders by the name of "boneless wings." It's stupid...just call them tenders. As you can see from the front of the box on this one, this would fall into this same category. These aren't wings, they are nuggets. Just call them that. Anyway, naming arguments aside, I picked up this box for $3.99 on sale at Marsh. Each serving in the box contains 200 calories and there are about 3.5 servings per box. Now, what is laughable is that a "serving" is five "wings". How the heck is that a serving? A serving is eight nuggets or ten nuggets. What a joke.
Portion sizes aside, you can obviously see that these look just like breaded chicken nuggets with a little orange buffalo flavoring on the outside. The breading is thick and crumbly and the "wings" are slightly oily, which is odd. The interior looks pretty much like processed chicken except for the fact that it has a slight greenish hue, which I guess would infer the vegetarian aspect of these "wings." And yes, I'm going to keep putting "wings" in quotation marks because of the absurdity of it. There's about 16-18 of these in the box and they aren't particularly large.
In terms of taste, these "wings" taste just like processed chicken nuggest. Honestly, if you were to put a real buffalo flavored chicken nugget (i.e. like those from Wendy's) and one of these in front of me, I'd have a hard time distinguishing the difference, so obviously MorningStar farms has the texture and flavor of the interior pretty well down. The crumbly breading is kind of upsetting because it breaks up everywhere in your hands, but it tastes as you would expect it to taste. The real question on this one is how the buffalo flavoring translated to the taste and in that respect, I would say that it translated quite well. There was a spicy and peppery kick to each wing that brought a nice amount of heat to each bite (and each of these wings was really only bite sized). All in all, they did a good job with the buffalo aspect here.
Buy It or Fly By It? In this instance, I say FLY BY IT but not because of taste because MorningStar Farms did well on that, but because of price. I was fortunate enough to get these on sale, but if you are buying these at regular price, it's probably not worth it, especially when you are essentially buying a small serving of chicken nuggets.
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| FLY BY IT!! |
I think they need to be spicier. I usually top them with some Frank's Red Hot sauce and serve them with homemade blue cheese dip. Much better.
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