Trader Joe's Riced Cauliflower

If this looks like a product we've reviewed before, well, it kinda is, kinda isn't. Trader Joe's now has not one but two "riced cauliflower" products. The first to come out was this frozen organic one. Later, they brought out the one you see here--not organic, and refrigerated rather than frozen. $2.49 per bag.

It was released a couple of months ago, but I could never find it in my local TJ's until this week. I suspect the reason is that the paleo diet people, when they find either of the two products, buy it all up. Following the #TraderJoes hashtag on Twitter, I frequently see comments about the store being out of riced cauliflower again, or squealing with delight at finally finding it in stock, or stories of people fighting over the last bag available, or bragging about buying a whole freezer's worth of it. As far as I know, these two products are the only things for which TJ's outlets routinely impose purchase restrictions--usually a two-bags-per-customer limit.

Here are a couple of typical examples just from the past several days:

One recent article I found compared the two TJ's products with two methods of preparing your own riced cauliflower. They concluded that the TJ's frozen was better than the refrigerated.

I beg to differ. I thought this stuff was much better than the frozen--at least it's better than my memory of the frozen, which admittedly may be in error. I suppose the easiest way to phrase it is that this stuff tasted like good cauliflower, while the frozen tasted like mediocre cauliflower. To be sure, that may well reflect more of a batch-to-batch variation than any intrinsic difference, but that was my experience with one sample of each.


Will I buy it again? 

No. As I said in the first review, if I want cauliflower, I'll have cauliflower, and if I want rice, I'll have rice. Because I do not stand in mortal fear of carbohydrates, I have no reason to have one masquerade as the other.