Trader Joe’s Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese Review

Trader Joe's Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese

We love macaroni and cheese here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, so we’re always happy to take another mac and cheese for a spin. Today’s version is Trader Joe’s Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese, which we’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. Just look at the picture on the box and tell us your stomach isn’t growling in anticipation!

When you pull this out of the box, you can feel that it has a good deal of weight to it. Obviously, this is a big, hearty meal, and it takes a decent amount of time to cook it up, at five to six minutes of microwave time.

This is quite an ambitious dish, combining pepperoni pizza with macaroni and cheese. In some ways, it almost feels like a lasagna rather than a true mac and cheese dish. With the pepperoni dominating the scent, this smells more like a pizza than anything else. It’s an interesting mix.

Before you eat this, you’ll want to give it a good stir. All the cheese is at the top with the pepperoni, so if you eat from the top down, you’ll end up with a mess of plain noodles at the bottom of the dish. Stirring is an easy way to avoid this fate.

Trader Joe's Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese

The cheese is mozzarella, so don’t expect a creamy cheese sauce. It’s stretchy, and it keeps the macaroni noodles clumped up. There is some red sauce, though, so it’s not completely sauceless. It could have probably used some more sauce — or even a tad bit of cheddar cheese sauce — to cover the noodles a bit better, but this isn’t a dealbreaker or anything. It still tastes very good.

The pepperoni is a bit tough. While we would have preferred something a little bit softer, it’s not terrible or anything. And the flavor is very good, so that makes up for the toughness a bit.

The noodles are your classic elbows. They’re nothing fancy, but they’re about as traditional as it gets. We have no complaints here.

One thing we’re not excited about is that this meal is supposedly two servings. What are we supposed to do, cut this in half and cook up each half separately? Give us a break, Trader Joe’s! This also means the appealing calorie count, 290, needs to be doubled. This dish actually has 580 calories (100 from fat), so it’s not as diet-friendly as the box makes it seem. It’s also exploding with sodium, at 1,500 mg. Yikes!

While dieters will want to stay away, Trader Joe’s Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese is very tasty. If we were allowed to change up the formula, we’d probably experiment with adding different cheese sauces to find a good match. But even without this tweak, this is a great meal that will really fill you up.

If you want to learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Trader Joe’s frozen food, check out our package scan below.

Trader Joe's Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese

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