Trader Joe's Cauliflower Tot Casserole

Tater tots--except made from riced cauliflower instead of taters, so lower carb numbers--with a white sauce and gooey cheese. What's not to love? Very comfort-foody.

Because I had time while other things were cooking, I did the oven method instead of microwave. As seems to always be the case with TJ's frozen-to-oven products, it required about 10 minutes more than the package directs. Due to that, I didn't apply the optional additional 2-3 minutes of broiler time to get the promised "golden brown top," but I will next time because it definitely would have been better that way.

Nitpicking: The tots at the edges, where the cheese and sauce didn't quite reach, maintained their integrity. But most of the rest couldn't stand up to the cheese and sauce and became sort of an indistinguishable mash. It didn't affect the taste at all, but it would have been more texturally satisfying if they had enough crispiness to remain distinct tots.

Claimed serving size of 3 is about right. Nina and I had it as a side dish to some chili last night, and about 1/3 of it was left for my lunch today.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. It's already on my Thanksgiving dinner shopping list.

Trader Joe's Baby Cauliflower

To start with, I think--but do not know--that this is simply ordinary cauliflower harvested earlier than usual. Nina thinks it's a different cultivar. She might be right; after all, Trader Joe's sells "baby broccoli" that is actually broccolini. But I can't find anything online that says that "baby cauliflower" is something biologically different from cauliflower.

All that aside, I wasn't impressed with this. The stem:head ratio is way too high. I ended up throwing away about half of the weight of the package because I didn't want to eat so much of the thick stems, and cut them short.

What was left was nothing special. It didn't strike me as especially desirable in either texture or flavor. In fact, if anything, it had less flavor than my usual cauliflower. I tried it with butter, then again with lemon juice, and both times I felt that I was tasting the condiment far more than the vegetable.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Egg Frittata With Swiss Cheese & Cauliflower

From the font of all knowledge: "Frittata is an egg-based Italian dish similar to an omelette or crustless quiche or scrambled eggs, enriched with additional ingredients such as meats, cheeses or vegetables. The word frittata is Italian and roughly translates to 'fried.'"

Last night while eating these, I commented to Nina, "It's like a little quiche with no crust." So I guess I had it about right.

The package suggests heating by either microwave or oven. I used a toaster oven, which worked great. They ended up having a nice texture, which I fear might be compromised with the microwave. The box says 15 minutes at 425 degrees. Based on long experience with TJ's frozen foods, I gave them 20 minutes, and they turned out perfect.

After egg, the dominant flavor is the onions and chives. You know how I feel about that. I had to mentally search to detect Swiss cheesiness. The cauliflower seems to contribute mostly some textural firmness, with the flavor totally MIA.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I ate my two, and didn't much object to them, but I couldn't find any love. Nina admired the nice texture, but said she wasn't wowed by the taste.

Trader Joe's Organic Spinach And Riced Cauliflower Salad

Trader Joe's seems determined to put cauliflower in everything. Within a few years, I fully expect to see TJ's stores stocked with cauliflower lollipops, cauliflower coffee, cauliflower bagels, freeze-dried cauliflower, and chocolate-covered cauliflower. And why not? People apparently make such products fly off the shelves. For the manufacturers, it's great to be able to use, instead of throw away, the cauliflower stems that are left over after they bag the more desirable florets.

Here, though, the finely chopped cauliflower plays second fiddle to the spinach. It's basically flavorless, adding nothing except a bit of crunch. Those bits tend to glom together, not disperse evenly.

The golden beets and almonds are so scarce as to be basically AWOL.

So what you're left with is basically a bag of spinach. It's perfectly decent spinach, but not very interesting. I, for one, want more from a salad than spinach.

After one bowl, I was kind of dreading the thought of eating my way through the rest of this. So Nina took it home and added it to a far more diverse salad that she was making to take to a potluck dinner with friends. It worked fine in that role.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Curry Cauliflower Quinoa Salad

You can figure out just about everything you need to know here from the name, ingredients, and photos. Nina and I both liked it--lots of flavors, lots of textures, moderately spicy, and overall quite different from anything we've had before. Serving size seems accurate; it fed both of us (as a side) for dinner, with leftover for my lunch the next day.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I eat lots of cauliflower plain, and don't feel a need to gussy it up like this. But if I ran into this at somebody else's house or at a potluck or something, I'd happily have more of it.

Trader Joe's Riced Cauliflower Stuffing

I would never have purchased this for myself, due to the prominent warning about leeks and onions on the package. But Nina bought it and served it with dinner recently, so I tried it.

It's just way too oniony for me. This is not news. After all, even having an onion in the same room with me is "too oniony" for me. The news is that it was also too oniony for Nina. That takes some doing.

She also wished to register a complaint that despite preparing it exactly as per the directions for the stovetop, it came out too wet and mushy.


Will I buy it again? 

Not a chance.

Trader Joe's Riced Cauliflower Stir Fry

I avoided buying this for myself because of "spring onions" in the description. I hate onions. But I guess I hate them a little less than I used to. Nina bought this and served it as part of dinner one night at her place. I could taste some onion in every bite, and didn't like it--but unlike in earlier stages of my life, that didn't inhibit me from finishing off a serving.

When I try to imagine the product without the onion part, I rather like it. Nina liked it even without doing the mental subtraction.


Will I buy it again? 

Nope. Three reasons: (1) Onions. (2) I eat plenty of cauliflower already, and don't need it snuck into my diet as riced cauliflower. (3) I would strongly prefer rice in a product like this.

Trader Joe's Cauliflower Gnocchi

This is one of those occasional Trader Joe's products that I see people on social media get excited about a dozen or more times in the first few days, before I've even had a chance to get to the store. There are also several food-related click-bait web sites that keep up a steady output of Trader Joe's posts ("The [insert number] best [insert type of food] items at Trader Joe's"), and every one of them put up something about the new cauliflower gnocchi within the first week, all with their usual breathless "OMG!" rhetoric.

So how is it really? Well, it's hard to say--because I messed up the preparation.

See those "Pan saute" directions below?

Well, I was following them. But I had a brain fart, and stopped reading after the "about 6 to 8 minutes." Somehow I had mentally put, "And then you're done!" at the end of that first sentence. So they ended up hot but not really cooked right. And they were too sticky. All my fault. I did think it was strange that they weren't browned at all, and they were still kinda gloppy and sticking together, but those misgivings were not enough to prompt me to look at the directions again.

But they tasted decent--just the very mild cauliflower flavor that you'd expect. The only other ingredients are cassava flour, potato starch, olive oil, and salt. So they taste like cauliflower because that's all they can taste like.


Will I buy it again? 

Well, I have to, in order to do the cooking right and report back in an addendum to this post. After that, though, I'm already pretty sure it will be a no. On the rare occasions that I feel like having gnocchi, I would just use the standard potato version. I ain't afraid of no carbs.


Addendum, 1/15/20: 

Apparently the texture is not good even if you follow the directions exactly. There are now a bunch of articles telling you better ways to cook these than the manufacturer came up with. For your convenience, I've assembled them:

https://iowagirleats.com/2019/01/08/3-ways-to-cook-trader-joes-frozen-cauliflower-gnocchi/

https://lexiscleankitchen.com/trader-joes-cauliflower-gnocchi/

https://www.wellandgood.com/good-food/cauliflower-gnocchi-how-to-cook/

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/trader-joes-cauliflower-gnocchi-recipes

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/g26966736/trader-joes-cauliflower-gnocchi/

https://www.wellandgood.com/good-food/cauliflower-gnocchi-recipes/

https://www.popsugar.com/fitness/Trader-Joe-Cauliflower-Gnocchi-Recipes-44997012?stream_view=1

Trader Joe's Gluten Free Cheese Pizza With A Cauliflower Crust

This frozen pizza is surprising because it's not terrible. The crust is actually kind of an amazing wonder of modern food technology: made of cauliflower, but not dominated by a cauliflower taste, and with a completely normal--even commendable--thin-crust-pizza texture. Nina and I both thought that the cheese and tomato sauce were acceptable, but nothing to brag about. That crust, though, has a lot of potential.


Will I buy it again? 

No. But it's easily the best gluten-free frozen pizza I've had, and I'd readily recommend it to somebody who needed to keep gluten-free.

Trader Joe's Organic Rainbow Cauliflower

Nina served this with dinner recently. The florets come in yellow, green, and purple--just like the rainbow cauliflower heads TJ's used to sell. (I haven't seen them in quite a while.) Otherwise, they're just like regular cauliflower, in taste, texture, etc.


Will I buy it again? 

Probably not. I eat a lot of fresh cauliflower, so I'm buying it regularly--which means I don't need to have it frozen to have on hand for occasional use. However, I might be tempted some day to make a dinner with this, Colorful Carrot Coins, and Roasted Rainbow Potatoes just to blow my guests' minds.

Trader Joe's Cauliflower Pizza Crust

People have been going gaga over this item since it first hit the Trader Joe's shelves a couple of months ago. It sells out everywhere about as fast as they get it in. I've seen the space for it in my local store's freezer case, but it had always been empty until about two weeks ago, when I was finally able to nab one.

The cooking directions are a little peculiar: 450 degrees for 10-12 minutes on one side, then flip it over and repeat, then add toppings and cook for an additional 5-8 minutes. I did it, using TJ's excellent pizza sauce, TJ's organic mozzarella shreds, and Morning Star fake bacon pieces. The result was one of the best homemade pizzas of my life.

Surprisingly, the crust was almost completely neutral in flavor, not nearly as distinctly cauliflower as I had assumed it would be. It basically served as a physical vehicle for the toppings, rather than as a key ingredient in its own right. I'm going to try the same toppings with a more standard crust soon, and I suspect the result will be even better.


Will I buy it again? 

No, not unless some occasion arises in which I will need to make pizza for guests who are avoiding carbs and/or gluten. Those are really the only reasons one would pick this over a traditional crust, and since neither applies to me, I don't have any need for this special product. But if I did, I'd be happy to have it available.

Trader Joe's Mashed Cauliflower

I lost the picture I took of this, so the one above is stolen from Trader Joe's introduction to the product, here. This accident conveys the additional advantage that you can see the form the stuff takes--those frozen pellets in the background. That should make it easy to dispense and prepare a consistent amount when you don't want the whole bag at once.

But for me, that convenience is about all this item has going for it. Sure, it's cauliflower, and tastes as cauliflower should. But I eat plenty of cauliflower as it is; I don't need more in my diet. And sure, it has fewer carbohydrates than an equivalent amount of mashed potatoes, but I don't feel any need to avoid carbs by such substitutions. Worse, it came out watery and soupy, despite my having followed the cooking directions. And vegans, take note: This is not for you, as it is made with milk and cream.


Will I buy it again? 

No. This is just not a thing I need in my life. I'll continue to eat my broccoli/cauliflower mix in native form several times a week. And on the occasions that I want mashed potatoes, I'll have mashed potatoes.

Trader Joe's Organic Creamy Cauliflower Soup

Sometimes when I debut a new TJ's product at one of my weekly dinners with Nina, we both try it at the same time, but silence prevails because neither of us wants to unfairly influence the opinion of the other. Then somebody breaks the ice.

Last night, with this soup, it was me. I mumbled, "This isn't very good." This implicitly gave Nina permission to reveal the emphatic opinion she had been holding back: "It's TERRIBLE!"

She had three or four spoonfuls before pushing the bowl away and refusing to eat more. I powered through the whole bowl. I was mostly trying to figure out what it was that I was finding so distasteful.

It basically comes down to pepper. I think it's specifically the plain old black pepper--which, though near the end of the list of ingredients by weight, is weirdly front and center in the taste department. Its prominence and dissonance with the other flavors reminds me of the famous Blue Oyster Cult sketch on Saturday Night Live. Except instead of "More cowbell!" somebody in the TJ's test kitchen was yelling "More black pepper!"

I first learned of the existence of this product from following the #TraderJoes tag on Twitter. The person who tweeted about it--Lara from Connecticut--wanted her opinion known here, and I promised to include it:

Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Roasted Cauliflower & Cheese Mezzelune

This is ravioli, despite the fancy "half-moon" shape and name.

It's excellent--loved it. I think it's my second-favorite TJ's ravioli, after the Goat Cheese & Sun Dried Tomato version. (Well, I think I actually liked the Chicken Pot Pie version best of all, but I haven't bought that again, as part of my general reduction in use of meat-containing things.)


Will I buy it again? 

Yes.

Trader Joe's Kale & Cauliflower Curry Salad

For once, I forgot to take a photo of this product when I brought it home, so I swiped the above from Trader Joe's web site, here.

This stuff is not good. The cauliflower is OK, but the kale is tough and bitter. (I think I'm just going to have to accept that any kale in my life will have to be the "baby" variety; I have not been able to get into the regular variety, despite many attempts.) There are way too many wheat berries, which don't add much except for a little chewiness. There are a few golden raisins, for a nice touch of sweetness. The "curry" is pretty un-curry-like. I don't know what's going on with it, but it didn't taste like real curry to me. I couldn't work up the interest to explore the ingredients list to figure out what it was.

The whole thing just didn't work. I suppose I ate about 3/4 of my half of it; Nina ate less than 1/4 of hers.

For an opposing point of view, see this review from the "Eat at Joe's" blog, the author of which absolutely loved it.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Nature's Reward Purple Cauliflower

This is obviously a non-TJ's branded product, but is sold through their stores. You can read a bit about it from the producer here. As you'll see, it comes in purple, green, and orange. I'm assuming that they are all essentially the same, except for color. I picked the purple just because it was the most visually striking--utterly different from any other cauliflower I've had before.

It really is purple. Even better, when you add a little lemon juice, which is how I like to eat it, it turns a lovely shade of pink.

It's better than average cauliflower, whether or not you like the color. (I do.)


Will I buy it again? 

Once in a while. But mostly I'm going to stick to the pre-cut florets, and mix them with broccoli, because (1) I'm lazy, and (2) I like the combination better than I like eating either vegetable alone.

Nina's View

Pretty in pink! It's probably placebo effect, but I found this cauliflower to be slightly sweeter and less cabbage-y than your average head of the regular stuff.

Trader Joe's Broccoli Florets and Cauliflower Florets

I've written previously about how I buy and eat a lot of packages of mixed broccoli and cauliflower florets. I also mentioned in that post that Trader Joe's had become my preferred brand because they tended to skimp on the cauliflower less than other brands do, and thus have a more balanced ratio of the two vegetables.

Maybe the first few times I bought it I just got lucky on that count. Or maybe they changed how they package the product. But I found over time that it was getting hard to find a bag on the store shelf that maintained anywhere near the 1:1 ratio that I sought and had come to expect from TJ's.

One day, as I was feeling a bit irked by my perception that TJ's was going the way of the rest of the brands of similar duets, I noticed, for the first time, the separate bags pictured above. I suppose they had probably been there all along, and I didn't see them, because I was specifically looking for the mixture. But once I noticed them, it was instantly obvious that I had finally found the solution to the ratio problem: buy both and mix them myself!

So I did. And I am happy now. It's a tiny bit more work to open two packages and pour out some from each, but I don't mind that. I do have to check carefully to be sure I'm getting the freshest bags available, because they stay good for only about a week, and it takes me a week to get through using a bag of each item.

I sort of confirmed my suspicion that the packagers lean more heavily on the broccoli because it's cheaper; the broccoli alone costs $2.29, while the cauliflower costs $2.49.


Will I buy it again? 

Many, many times. You know how life is filled with tiny annoyances? I now have one fewer.


Update 

I wrote the above months ago, and since then I have continued to purchase and use these. They are a true staple in my fridge now, available just about all the time.

I believe I have also discovered a second reason that cauliflower is less abundant than broccoli in the duet mixtures: Cauliflower is denser. So even if you put equal weights of each together, you'll have more florets of broccoli, because each one weighs less. You can get a good sense of the truth of that from the photo above. Both bags have the same weight of produce, but the cauliflower bag looks a lot less full--because it is.

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.

Trader Joe's Kung Pao Tempura Cauliflower

This is a brand-new product; Trader Joe's has not yet posted a description of it. $4.99 for a 24-ounce bag.

I liked this a lot more than I expected I would. The cauliflower comes in huge florets that emerge from the oven amazingly tender. The sauce is surprisingly spicy for a TJ's product. As Nina noted, "The Blandification Committee must have been on vacation."

Two quibbles: The packet of sauce contains at least twice as much as needed for the quantity of cauliflower, which just seems wasteful. And the cauliflower pieces themselves come in a plastic bag found within the outer plastic bag, which also seems wasteful.


Will I buy it again? 

Enthusiastically. Me likey.


Nina’s View

As Bob was preparing these I asked him to serve the sauce on the side, rather than stirring it in to the whole batch as prescribed by the instructions. I’m very glad that he accommodated me.

If you used the whole bag of sauce, you’d have a sodden, swamped batch of soggy cauliflower and it would taste mostly like pepper and sugar.

I used very little of the sauce, as I found that it tasted weirdly plain: salt, sugar, pepper. For me, it needed some more aromatics—like maybe some citrus notes (lemon juice, lemon oil). Or more garlic. SOMETHING. The pepper was hotter than I expected too.

Having said that, the cauliflower itself is not bad at all, and the breading (definitely NOT tempura, by the way) is nondescript but cooks up nicely. Were I to buy this, I would definitely tinker with the sauce and use it sparingly.

Trader Joe's Cauliflower Gratin

This is another in the line of ready-made side dishes that Trader Joe's rolls out for the holidays.

I can't recommend it. It's entirely edible, but disappointingly bland--apparently the latest victim of the Trader Joe's Blandification Committee. By some perverse bit of modern food science, they have manage to make both the cauliflower and the cheese sauce virtually tasteless. I would seriously prefer to eat just good cauliflower--plain--cooked for two minutes in the microwave oven.


Will I buy it again? 

No.