A series of mishaps with Lean Cuisine’s frozen foods has made us wary of delving too far into their Comfort Foods line. After all, if we want the kind of meal that Mom would make at home, we’d prefer it made by Mom rather than heated up in the microwave. (There are a few delicious exceptions, of course.)
But the package’s image of the Salisbury Steak with Macaroni & Cheese won us over. Just look at those mushrooms! And that beefy patty? Oh my!
Unfortunately, this meal is nothing like the tantalizing meal pictured on the box. It’s actually quite dull. And where are all the mushrooms? We only found a couple tiny mushroom slices in the whole dish.
The sauce is halfway decent, but it doesn’t do enough to hide how bland the beef patty is. This thing tastes like week-old leftover meatloaf. There are a few measly bits of onion and a couple slivers of mushroom floating around in the sauce, but there’s definitely isn’t enough of either of them to count for anything.
We had initially hoped that if the beef patty wasn’t great then at least the mac and cheese portion would be there to make up for it, but even the macaroni is soggy and flavorless. Lean Cuisine — who makes an okay standalone mac and cheese, by the way — couldn’t even get that part right.
Lean Cuisine’s Salisbury Steak and Macaroni & Cheese feels like a low-effort attempt at adding an unnecessary dish to their already robust frozen food line. This meal is a hard pass. For a dish that sets out to accomplish the same goals yet succeeds alarmingly well, we strongly recommend Devour’s Bacon Topped Meatloaf with Smoky Garlic Mac & Cheese.
If you want to know more about the ingredients and nutrition info in this Lean Cuisine dish, check out our package scans below.
