Single-serve frozen meals will likely always be the bread and butter of the frozen food industry. However, there’s a lot to be said about multi-serve frozen dinners, such as the Stouffer’s Italian Sausage Pasta (Meal for 2). We’ve tried a lot of multi-serve dinners here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, and Stouffer’s usually delivers a pretty high level of quality in that area. In fact, multi-serve pastas are where Stouffer’s truly shines. Obviously, we’re quite excited about trying out the Italian Sausage Pasta.
Now, this might look a little bit familiar to longtime Freezer Meal Frenzy readers. Stouffer’s has a pretty similar item in their Bowl-Fulls line: the Spicy Italian Sausage Pasta. Just like the pasta bowl, this one contains ruffled radiatore pasta and ground Italian sausage. This meal, however, comes with tomato chunks and spinach on top of everything else. That sounds like a positive addition, but we’ll have to taste this pasta before we make any judgement calls about that.
This bigger-sized meal comes with a bigger cook time. You could get away with heating this for 11 minutes if you choose the microwave, but for a true oven-baked experience, this will take a whopping 70 minutes to cook. We bit the bullet and went with the oven here, because these multi-serve meals always seem to come out better that way.
So how does it taste? Well, we split this between two reviewers, and one found it to be halfway decent while the other absolutely hated it.
A good deal of the hatred comes from the sauce, which tastes a little bitter. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing on its own, but the flavor of the spinach compounds this effect. If you’re not a huge fan of spinach (admittedly, the reviewer who hated this does not like spinach), the cumulative effect of these two things might be too much.
The radiatore pasta would be fine in another dish — it’s a really fun shape — but it ends up a bit slimy in this particular concoction. It’s actually a bit disappointing, as we usually love ruffly pasta like this. It’s just really hard to enjoy radiatore pasta when it feels like it’s oozing around in your mouth.
The sausage is pretty okay. It’s nothing special (the flavor seems sort of muted) and it’s a bit more rubbery than we expected. We would have loved something a bit more pronounced, and perhaps even a bit spicier. This stuff is inoffensive at best.
The nutrition content on the side of the box lists out half a tray as a serving size (as it should, considering this is advertised as a meal for two people). Thus there are some pretty big numbers in those nutrition contents, such as 660 calories (250 from fat) and 1,130 mg of sodium. This is definitely supposed to be a hearty dinner rather than some sort of diet food. Definitely keep that in mind if you’re eyeballing this frozen food at the grocery store.
We had high hopes for the Stouffer’s Italian Sausage Pasta (Meal for 2), but the reality just didn’t live up to our expectations. Stouffer’s does make a lot of really good multi-serve meals; this just isn’t one of the better ones. If you’re looking for a great Stouffer’s pasta dish, you’ll do much better with the Large Family Size Baked Ziti or the Spicy Pomodoro Penne.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Stouffer’s frozen pasta, check out our package scans below.
With the Stouffers Italian sausage and pasta it does taste a little Bland. When it is done cooking I would just add a little bit of sugar in it. When I make spaghetti I always add sugar in the sauce.