Friday, December 12, 2008

Trader Joe's Pad Thai

A while ago I bought this box of pad thai at Trader Joe's. I figure that it was the perfect thing to bring to work to eat and I love pad thai, so what could be better? Well, this could be better. It looked a bit odd from the get go, the noodles were all smooshed and vacuum packed and the sauce came in a silver space age looking package. Sexy food this was not. I believe I would give them a D on packaging. The cute blue box was nice, but it should be about the food.

I emptied both packets into the redeeming blue box, mix it up and separated the sad white noodles and stuck it in the nuker for the 2 specified minutes. Doo doo doo, wait wait wait. Ok, I removed the box and instantly burned my hand on the steam coming out of the top of the box, an auspicious start. First taste: meh. It just wasn't very good. The noodles were fine, I was actually surprised at the consistency. But the sauce was just bad. It tasted fake. I sort of felt like I was eating a version of pad thai that looks like pad thai but actually has not one ingredient that is actually found in pad thai. It was quite odd. And I was quite disappointed for this was my lunch and it was like a was a little bit cheated. I usually love Trader Joe's food. I use their tomato sauce all the time which is both cheap and fresh tasting. But I thing that Trader Ming should take some lessons from Trader Giotto and Trader Jose, for they are doing a better job supporting their culinary cultures than poor Ming.

1 comment:

Christy said...

I couldn't agree with you more. I thought the pad thai was so terrible that I went looking for something on the web about it just out of curiosity. I thought, surely someone else is as surprised as I am that TJ's would produce this!