If you’re looking for a warm, traditional lunch, you could certainly do much worse than a tuna casserole — or tuna hot dish for our Minnesotan readers. This is the sort of meal that makes a welcome treat on almost any occasion, and we typically welcome the opportunity to review a good tuna casserole here at Freezer Meal Frenzy.
Today, we’re diving into Stouffer’s Tuna Noodle Casserole with high expectations. Stouffer’s has some pretty good frozen food in their lineup; they surely have what it takes to make a great tuna casserole, right?
This meal has a very long cook time. The microwave instructions call for seven entire minutes. This is the sort of cook time we’d expect for a hearty lasagna dish, not a simple tuna casserole. But if you pick this thing up, you’ll notice it has a good deal of weight to it. This is a pretty dense meal in its own right.
The instructions also ask you to remove the plastic film that seals the meal in its dish, which is atypical for a frozen meal. We had a bit of trouble doing so, since the bond that holds the film to the tray is stronger than the film itself. We kept ripping the film instead of peeling it off quickly and easily.
This comes out of microwave — after an excruciatingly long wait — smelling potently of seafood. We found this odd, because tuna is typically one of the less fishy-tasting fish out there, and it’s presence is usually pretty subtle in casseroles.
That carries over to the taste too. While many of the tuna casseroles we’ve tasted used tuna as sort of an undertone, this whole meal tastes like tuna. It’s not subtle at all. If you love tuna, you’re going to be in tuna-lovin’ heaven. And if you don’t like tuna, why would you consider eating a tuna casserole?
There is a very generous portion of breadcrumbs here too. Between the overpowering fish flavor and the large portion of breadcrumbs, there were points where we almost swore we were eating a breaded fish patty instead of a casserole.
The egg noodles are a great choice for this dish. They don’t try to do anything fancy, but they also don’t get in the way.
This casserole is also dotted with the occasional pea or piece of celery. They aren’t the emphasis of the dish by any means, and they sort of stay in the background for the most part. We suspect their presence might just be there to remind us of Grandma. Awwww, Grams!
There are supposed to be mushrooms as well, and as big fans of mushrooms, that was one of the big selling points of this dish for us. Unfortunately, they’re barely there at all. We found one tiny piece of mushroom in the entire dish (plus a broken-off fleck of mushroom that we don’t think counts).
This meal contains 380 calories (150 from fat). While this isn’t in the diet category, the calorie count is far lower than we expected considering how heavy the tray was when we first picked it up. It does contain a fair amount of sodium, though, at 740 mg. While this is pretty standard in the world of frozen food, it’s pretty high compared to many other types of foods. So if you’re watching your sodium levels, you might want to avoid frozen meals altogether.
Stouffer’s Tuna Noodle Casserole is a frozen meal that really knows its audience. It’s very specifically designed to appeal to lovers of tuna in a big way. Lovers of mushrooms? Not so much. But then again, this is a tuna casserole, not a mushroom casserole. We’ll have to go elsewhere to get our mushroom fix.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients found in this frozen casserole, check out our package scans below.
