Jessica Block
If you’ve had frozen stir fry veggie mixes before, then you know they can be pretty hit or miss. They rarely yield crunchy, vibrant, flavorful results—the culprit? Sometimes it’s the soupy sauce they provide, sometimes it’s the frozen veggies themselves, and other times the instructions themselves are totally off. My other beef with many packaged frozen stir fry veggies? Too many carrots! They’re truly the main character in so many of these when I seldom see carrots in homemade stir frys. At least half of the frozen stir fry mixes we tried were between 50% and 85% carrot. But I digress. Let’s talk about what we do want in the best stir fry veggies.
What we looked for in the best frozen stir fry veggie mixes
- It should taste like a fresh stir fry (or as close an approximation as possible), and brown up nicely in a pan.
- The veggies should be crunchy (no mushy peas, thank you very much—that is something else entirely, and it can stay in England).
- The veggies should taste like the vegetable they purport to be
- Any add-ins—like noodles, chicken, etc.—should cook up nicely with the given package instructions.
- A sauce-free frozen stir fry veggie mix should go nicely with sauce, and sauced stir fry vegetables should contain a good, flavorful sauce. (If you buy the plain kind, please allow us to recommend the best stir fry sauce.)
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- Bird’s Eye Stir Fry Veggies & Sauce Sweet & Sour
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We almost didn’t put this one on the list, but hear us out because we think it has its place. This one straight up tastes like commercial American sweet and sour chicken without the chicken (the included “veggies” are bell peppers, onions, and pineapple). Unsurprisingly, we felt it needed chicken, and that makes sense since the packaging suggests adding a protein (we didn’t though, since we didn’t add one to any of the other candidates). All that said, this was not bad at all, just a bit soupy. If you are craving a sweet and sour stir fry, we say pick up this one and supplement with more veggies (and/or) chicken to account for the very high sauce-to-stuff ratio, and you should be fine. It should be noted that the suggested cooking method leaves the veggies a bit wet and mushy, but if you don’t follow the package instructions, just stir fry the veggies, then add the sauce, we think that will solve the issue.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
- Bird’s Eye Stir Fry Veggies & Sauce Asian Style
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These stir fry veggies are pretty good! The sauce is salty and sour, and the veggies taste crunchy and fresh. It must be noted however, that about 85% of those veggies are julienned carrots. Not bad carrots, mind you—no freezer taste or mushiness, they do in fact taste like carrots—there were just so many that from a distance a bowl of this frozen stir fry veggie mix would just look entirely orange. And that struck us as strange.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
- Bird’s-Eye Stir Fry Veggies & Sauce Teriyaki
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The sauce that comes with this frozen stir fry is a pretty standard-issue, garden-variety teriyaki sauce with an ever-so-slight kick to it. It also comes with what look and taste like a bunch of 3-inch-long pieces of linguine, mixed in with some bell peppers, carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, peas, and baby corn. Ideally, this would have a slightly higher veggie-to-noodle ratio if it is calling itself a stir fry and not frozen yakisoba, but this would be great with some added protein, like scrambled egg or marinated chicken or both.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
- Great Value Sugar Snap Pea Stir Fry
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This Great Value stir fry veggie mix has no right to be as good as it is, but here we are, and here you are, reading that our second-place stir fry is a bag of plain frozen veggies from Walmart. Why did we rate this humble bag of frozen veg so high? Well, for starters, the veggies are juicy and crunchy, and even after we added our own stir fry sauce (from our list of best stir fry sauces), we could still taste the flavor of the fresh veggies with no freezer-induced plasticky-ness to be found. The peas are sweet and crunchy, the broccoli is flavorful, and the water chestnuts are crispy. We swear if this bad boy had snozzberries in it, the snozzberries would taste like snozzberries. Hot tip: Do not microwave it. Cook it on the stove. It won’t take that much longer, and that extra five minutes will make a world of difference in flavor. Believe us. We’ve prepared a lot of frozen stir fried veggies recently.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
- Puravida Skillet Meals Chicken Stir Fry
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This was very clearly the winner. It has a whole rainbow of veggies (excluding blue…but we are willing to overlook that just this once), and it tastes fresh, well-seasoned, and slightly charred in a “freshly cooked in a hot skillet” sort of way. The red onion adds a lot of flavor to the mix (along with the other seasonings they have coated the veggies and chicken with), and makes it so you don’t even need sauce to make this stir-fry taste delicious. The crunchy, fresh veggies go well with the tender, moist, flavorful chicken, and truly make this a time-saving banger of a stir fry mix.
Credit: Merc / Instacart
Most Flavorful Sauce
Most Carrots
Best with Noodles
Best Veggies Only
Ariana Losch
Jordan Myrick
Gwynedd Stuart
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!