A good macaroni and beef dish — which we’ve sometimes heard referred to as a goulash, though we don’t think that’s completely accurate — can be quite a lovely treat. It’s like the more grown-up older brother to a classic mac and cheese. So we were pretty hyped to be trying out Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef to see how it tastes.
Now, this is something we end up saying about just about every Stouffer’s meal we try: this thing takes ages to cook. he instructions say to cook it for four minutes, stir, then cook for three more. That’s a total cook time of seven minutes. That’s an eternity in microwave time.
Is all that cooking necessary? We’re not sure. At the four-minute mark, we still found chunks of ice in our macaroni. But after the full seven minutes, the sauce was literally boiling.
When it finally comes out, it smells more like a meatloaf than a macaroni dish. Judging by the smell alone, Stouffer’s didn’t skimp out on the beef portion of this meal.
And that’s no illusion. This meal really does have a substantial portion of beef in it. The beef tastes great too. We were expecting something pretty meatloafy — due to the smell — but we’d actually say this tastes like a high-quality hamburger patty. It’s very good.
The noodles are fantastic. They’re a sort of chubbier version of the traditional elbow, and they have a nice consistency. They’re not too soggy, like some of the other macaroni and beef dishes we’ve tried.
The sauce is where the problems start to show. This sauce is pretty watery and it kind of tastes like ketchup. While the ketchup flavor isn’t necessarily a bad thing when the meat tastes so much like a hamburger, the combination of that and the soupiness is really not a good combo.
At 370 calories (120 from fat), this isn’t one of the leanest meals out there. But at least Stouffer’s didn’t try to pretend that half a meal was a satisfying serving here — 370 calories is the amount in the entire dish, not just half of it. It’s also a bit high in sodium at 880 mg.
Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef is just alright. With a better sauce this would be a killer meal. As is, it just tastes too much like noodles and meat in a bowl of boiled ketchup water. The end result is not quite as unappealing as that description makes it sound, but Stouffer’s definitely failed to hit this one out of the park.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen macaroni dish, check out our package scans below.
