Devour is one of our favorite frozen food brands — we especially love their Buffalo Chicken Mac & Cheese — so we were a bit surprised to see one of their products somewhere that wasn’t a freezer aisle. We typically stick with frozen food review here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, but we are willing to make the occasional exception (we review Amy’s Kitchen soups from time to time). And when it comes to Devour, we’re pretty much always willing to bend the rules a bit.
So today, we’ll be trying out the Devour Hot & Melty Nacho Mac & Cheese.
As you can see in our picture below, this meal comes with several components. There’s a bowl with some noodles, accompanied by a package of tortilla chips, a seasoning packet, and a shiny gold packet of cheese sauce. Where a typical Devour frozen macaroni dish would typically just be tossed into the microwave, there’s obviously some assembly required here.
First, you’ll need to crack open the package, then dump the contents of the seasoning packet into the dish. Next, you’ll fill the dish with water up to the fill line.
Now, this is where we got a bit confused. There is no line on the dish that says “fill,” which would have cleared things up for us. Instead, there is a lower line, about an inch from the bottom of the dish, and a second line near the rim. To make things even more confusing, the instructions include an icon that shows the water filled to the wrong line.
Now, to be perfectly clear, it’s the lower of the two lines that you’re supposed to fill the water to. If you’re in a panic, shouting “Where is the fill line on this Devour mac and cheese?” we’ve got you covered. Check out our picture below to see where the fill line is located.
After all that “fill line” drama is sorted, simply toss this into the microwave for four minutes and 30 seconds, mix in the cheese sauce, then top it all with the tortilla chips. We were hoping this would be easy, but it’s actually a lot more work than a frozen mac and cheese.
So how does it taste?
Well, first of all, the cheese is a bit of a mess. Because you’ll still have a bit of moisture in the bottom of the dish when you mix the cheese in, it will get a bit watery. On top of that, it tastes like a sort-of-generic, Velveta-style cheese, which we’re just not fond of. The spices are there to give it some southwest zing, but it’s not enough to save this dish.
To make matters worse, the tortilla chips are incredibly stale. And we don’t mean they’re just a little past their shelf date — these are unforgivably stale. They’re overly hard at first, and then when you mix them into the sauce they get chewy. Eating these chips is not a pleasant experience by any means.
Devour’s frozen meals are not known for being low in calories, and we’re a bit sad to say this packaged mac and cheese won’t be bucking that trend. This meal contains 400 calories (120 from fat), and it’s not even very filling. Even worse, it has 860 mg of sodium. Yikes!
Before today, we’d only found one meal in Devour’s entire lineup that we didn’t enjoy (that was the Cheese Ravioli with Sun-Dried Tomato Cream Sauce). But now, we’re sad to say that we’re adding a second meal to that list. The Devour Hot & Melty Nacho Mac & Cheese just isn’t very good. And, when the Freezer Meal Frenzy staff can’t find anything good to say about a Devour meal, you know things must be pretty dire.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Devour mac and cheese, check out our package scan below.
