When you’re feeling like walking on the wild side — the not too wild side — a good specialty mac and cheese can really hit the spot. Sweet Earth might not have a lot of mac and cheese dishes in their impressive frozen food arsenal, but they do have the Pizza Mac & Cheese. We here at Freezer Meal Frenzy decided to give it a shot.
One of the first things we noticed about this dish is that when it comes out of the oven, it looks like this:
Of course, aesthetic isn’t the most important thing to look for in a frozen food, but still, that’s a pretty-looking dish, right?
Unfortunately, as lovely as this mac and cheese looks, it makes several missteps on the path to great flavor. The most noticeable is the use of vegetable broth as a substitute for a cheese-based sauce. The thing about cheese sauces is that they typically have a bit of form to them; they don’t get all watery the way vegetable broth does. This dish is topped with some mozzarella, but it’s not enough to make up for just how runny the broth is. This feels more like a soup than a good mac and cheese.
The second misstep is that the seasoning is off. It’s a strange mashup of garlic, oregano, and rosemary, topped with several sauces that all seem to contain a good deal of garlic and onion powder. It’s ambitious, but it feels too much like it’s trying to cover something up.
The thing being covered up is almost certainly the veggie ground that serves as a meat substitute. It’s presence here is probably to create the effect of a hearty sausage pizza, but the whole package would have probably been better off without it. It doesn’t do much more than add a bit of texture, and the overload of spices that’s trying to make it taste more sausage-ish just gets in the way.
We admire Sweet Earth’s efforts here. After all, adding pizza elements to a mac and cheese is a pretty bold experiment (it’s a combination that works wondrously when it’s the other way around — mac and cheese is great on pizza). Unfortunately, this attempt just isn’t very good, and there are much better mac and cheese options on the market right now.
For an in-depth look at the nutrition and ingredients, see the package scans below.
