With the Rigatoni with Chicken and Pesto, Stouffer’s attempts to throw a spin on a traditional pasta dish. We’ve been meaning to check out Stouffer’s Creative Comforts line for a while now, so when we stumbled upon this at our local grocery store we knew we just had to see what it’s all about.
We’ve mentioned in the past that many Stouffer’s frozen meals take absurdly long to cook, with microwave times of over six minutes per meal. This meal bucks that trend, with under four minutes of total cook time. Simply heat for two minutes, stir, then heat for another minute and a half. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Now, you might be tempted to think there isn’t enough pesto sauce. It starts out as a giant glob of pesto, but it disappears into the noodles and chicken once you stir it. It takes some creative and enthusiastic stirring to get the sauce to cover everything in this dish. However, the flavor is quite potent, so the amount of sauce is actually pretty spot-on. It’s rich and even a little bit creamy, and it tastes excellent.
The chicken comes in bite-sized chunks, and it’s a little inconsistent. A good chunk of chicken will be rich and juicy with a grilled flavor to it, while a bad chunk will be hard and gristly or slimy and fatty. Thankfully, the amount of good pieces of chicken vastly outnumbered the bad in our dish. We’re not sure if this good-to-bad ratio is consistent across multiple boxes of this food, but for us it turned out pretty okay.
The noodles are your classic rigatoni shape, and we really don’t have a lot to say about them. They don’t turn out soggy or hard, like some other frozen pasta meals, and they blend into the dish pretty well. The fact that they don’t really stand out lets you enjoy the pesto flavor more, so inoffensive pasta is actually a good thing here.
With 390 calories (130 from fat), this certainly isn’t the leanest frozen food on the market, but at least Stouffer’s doesn’t feel the need to split the box into multiple portions just to make it seem like the calorie count is lower than it actually is. The sodium level isn’t all that bad for a frozen food, at 660 mg.
Stouffer’s Rigatoni with Chicken and Pesto is quite good. While it’s not perfect, the flavor more than makes up for its biggest flaw, which is the inconsistency of the chicken. We’re pretty sure we’ll be eating this again in the future.
To learn more about the ingredients and nutrition info for this Stouffer’s frozen pasta dish, check out our package scans below.
HORRIBLE, Someone forgot the sauce all together.
What did they do to the sauce! It’s horrible!