Review: MorningStar Farms Chik'n Strips Meal Starters

It's been a bit since I've either eaten or reviewed a MorningStar Farms product.  Recently, I had some tortilla wraps in my refrigerator that I had to use prior to the expiration date, so I figured that grabbing one of the bags of MorningStar Farms Chik'n Strips Meal Starters that I had in my refrigerator would be the perfect way to come up with a base starter for the filling in my wraps that I was making.  I picked this one up on sale at Marsh for $3.00 and it's an eight ounce package proclaiming it has roughly 2.5 servings of these veggie "Chick'n" strips.  Each serving has 140 calories and a whopping 23 grams of protein.  It's also cholesterol free, so this really is a fairly healthy product and as I read more and more of the packaging, I was exceptionally surprised by that.

You can microwave these if you want to roll the dice (I don't recommend it), but MorningStar advises that you brown these in a skillet to heat them up and I would recommend that you do the same.  For the purposes of my wraps, that's what I did, as you can see above.  There's not a lot to say here other than the fact that these chick'n strips do look like actual chicken but when you pick them up and tear them apart, they definitely don't react like chicken in that they are much softer and break apart quite easily.  I would almost say these have a borderline gelatinous feel and while that's odd, you've got to expect that from a veggie product made with soy beans.  These chick'n strips are also flavored with onion salt, garlic, pepper and a couple other seasonings, so you aren't just eating soy.

In order to get an accurate review of the strips themselves, I kind of abandoned the meal starter principle and had a couple of them on their own to get a fair gauge of their flavor and that gelatinous feel that they had also carried over to the chewing of these things.  They were soft and not nearly as tough as you'd expect normal chicken to be, but again, you are eating soy beans here and not an actual animal.  As far as the rest of the flavor, the onion salt, pepper, garlic, etc. were noticeable, but not overwhelmingly powerful.  Since this is a starter, you are supposed to bring the flavor on your own with whatever you add this too, so again, no big surprises.  After eating them individually, I threw these into my wraps with an assortment of other stuff (lettuce, cheese, olives, pickles, mustard) and as I was working my way through this wrap, you could have fooled me if you told me that this was not chicken (assuming I previously didn't know).  The flavor and chew factor were close enough to actual chicken that I would say that this was a reasonable approximation.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I would say to BUY IT.  Like I said, this is a reasonable enough approximation to chicken for a vegetarian product and if you flavor it correctly, this would be a good base and/or substitution for any sort of meal that you wanted to put together (buffalo sauce would be really good with these).  This meal starter is a winner for MorningStar Farms and if you are looking to try a new vegetarian product out, this is a good one to start with since it is so similar to actual chicken.

BUY IT!!