Trader Joe’s Cod Provencale With Ratatouille & Rice: Seafood Review

Trader Joe's Cod Provencale cover

If it were a little closer and a little less crazy inside, we would probably do more family shopping at Trader Joe’s. My wife made the trip the other day just to get some variety in the house and brought home a bunch of frozen entrees, including a seafood offering for me. Trader Joe’s Cod Provencale looks to be a small, but potentially tasty frozen seafood entree accompanied by rice and ratatouille, which would be the “Provencale” part. So let’s see if Trader Joe can whisk me away to the south of France…for $3.99!

The Packaging

One of the things I don’t like about Trader Joe’s products is the lack of transparency. I can’t tell you anything about this cod because there is nothing about it on the packaging. All I can tell you is that the main ingredient is cod and it is a product of France. I assume it is Atlantic cod caught and processed in the EU, but unless labeled, there really isn’t any way for me to tell.

Cod Provencale ingredients

The Product

I apologize for not having an image of the pre-cooked product, but when I ripped open the top of the package, I spilled a bunch of the rice. It was my fault for trying to rush things, the ingredients looked pretty good. The piece of cod was small, which is expected for the size and price of the entree, but looked good in its frozen state. Although, like most things I buy at Trader Joe’s, the portion size is a bit small for my tastes…I wish I had two.

Trader Joe’s Cod Provencale: The Recipe

Although it had microwave directions, I opted for the longer conventional oven version. Once in a blue moon I’ll reheat fish leftovers in the microwave, but I actually don’t mind eating cold fish and I’d never be the guy who nukes fish at work. All I had to do is rip off the paper cover, tent some foil over and cook at 350F for about 40 minutes.

cod provencale cooking

As it neared the end of cooking time I checked on the cod because I hadn’t heard any cooking sounds. I took a quick peak and it looked like it would take more time than the package suggested. I have a feeling they wanted me to microwave this and paid less attention to the oven times…or I desperately need a new oven.

Toward the end I flipped the piece of cod to show the more attractive side of the fish. Also, the so-called “silver side” of the fillet is the side the skin was on, and will not flake as well as the other side.

The Verdict: Trader Joe’s Cod Provencale

Cod Provencae with rice by trader joes

Not too bad, although it took about 50 minutes and it needed salt. The fish by that time was flaky and had good cod flavor but would have been very underwhelming without the flavorful ratatouille. Then again, a decent lunch or light seafood dinner for $4 that isn’t a deep fried patty is tough to beat. Plus, it was more filling than I anticipated so overall it was a great value.

As I prepared this post, I realized that a great blog that I follow had a similar opinion of Trader Joe’s Cod Provencale. Check out the review over at BecomeBetty!

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.