What are the best frozen chicken tenders? That question depends a lot on how oven baked chicken tenderloins no breading view the chicken tender.
Are you a purist who likes a sliced piece of tenderloin, covered in peppery breading? It’s a subjective issue, and whether you’re trying to re-create the sports bar menu at your local watering hole or the kids’ menu at your local trattoria, you’ve got a lot of options. We scoured the grocery stores and found a dozen different strips to sample and rank. Just so we’re clear: These are all chicken strips, not boneless wings. That is, they are oblong cuts of chicken, both animal and plant-based, breaded, deep-fried, and sometimes tossed in Buffalo sauce. All were baked — though frying and microwaving are also options — so the quality may vary depending on your cooking method.
Okay, so maybe a chicken tender with no chicken is about as surprising to see in last place as the Detroit Lions. But as anyone who’s ever tried an Impossible Burger knows, plant-based meat products aren’t necessarily worse than their animal-based counterparts anymore. Actually, yes they could, and they may in fact be the worst thing you could eat at Trader Joe’s that’s not from the organic soap section. These are effectively like eating a warmed-up piece of compressed sawdust, and would probably be more useful for house construction than actually eating. Trader Joe’s should be embarrassed to sully their good name by putting it on these things, and if you spent half an hour fighting for a parking space to buy a bag you definitely wasted your time. If your mouth has an abundance of moisture, and you need something to soak literally every drop of saliva out, Trader Joe’s Chickenless Crispy Tenders might be useful.
Otherwise, leave them in the freezer where they belong. Between the rustic, natural-foods-inspired packaging and the claims of organic, white meat chicken, one could easily mistake Applegate Organics Chicken Strips for something approaching high quality. The box touts the chicken’s natural, humane treatment, with no antibiotics used, ever. But look a little closer and you’ll see they’re also billed as “formed and breaded organic white meat patties.
We baked these for the purposes of the taste test, so maybe if they were fried they would have a little more heft. But hot out of the oven, they taste like a big mouthful of indiscernible chicken-y mush. They’re essentially heavily-processed blobs of ground chicken that have the consistency of salty oatmeal. If you needed proof that organic products can be just as low-quality and unappetizing as their chemically-concocted brethren, these are it. If a chicken strip could taste like neglect and disappointment, it would be Perdue’s chicken tenders. These sad ground and formed strips taste like latchkey kid nights when children of parents who had better things to do heated these up alongside a heaping portion of loneliness and canned corn.