Lasagna is one of our favorite foods here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, and we’ll rarely turn down the opportunity to try one we haven’t had before. While there is the occasional stinker, a vast majority of the frozen lasagna meals we’ve reviewed have been quite excellent.
So we had pretty high hopes going into Stouffer’s Lasagna with Meat and Sauce.
This thing is a true beast to cook. At 8 full minutes of cook time — half of that on low power — this is one of the longest microwave times we’ve encountered. (Of course, most of the longest microwave times we’ve seen were for lasagna meals like this one.) We hate to argue with Stouffer’s here, but we actually found the long cook time to be a little unnecessary. While you could probably cut maybe a minute off of that, we do have to warn you that cooking a meat-based dish for less than the recommended cook time isn’t always safe, so keep that in mind.
As you can see in our image above, this meal is by no means stingy on the sauce. The lasagna is just drowning in it. Of course, with such a large sauce portion comes great responsibility — the sauce has to be good or the rest of the meal would fall apart. Thankfully, this sauce is quite good. It’s a bit runnier than we’d have liked, but the flavor is spot-on. It’s not among the sweetest pasta sauces we’ve tried, but it does have some sweet undertones to it.
The box claims this has cottage cheese, parmesan, mozzarella, and mozzarella with cornstarch. While the cottage cheese is technically present, the portion is so small that we barely noticed it. We’ll make the same comment for the mozzarella — it’s barely there. Without a strong showing by these two cheeses, this meal definitely feels like it’s missing something.
The meat isn’t as good as we’d have liked. It has a generic meatloafy flavor to it, so it doesn’t really add a whole lot to this dish. We would have loved something with a bit of seasoning, or even something a bit more sausage-y. This beef just didn’t do it for us.
For a lasagna, the calorie count here is pretty low, at 350 (110 from fat). We’ve seen almost double this amount on other lasagnas, so 350 is pretty reasonable. The sodium is pretty high, though, at 850 mg, so be careful if you are watching your sodium levels.
Stouffer’s Lasagna with Meat and Sauce is a perfectly fine lasagna, but it’s not as good as it could be. It could certainly use a smaller sauce portion, more cottage cheese, and a better-tasting meat, for starters. But even so, this still tastes pretty good, and we have a really hard time hating any lasagna (though we can think of at least one that has raised our ire).
To learn more about the ingredients and nutrition content of this frozen lasagna meal, check out our package scans below.
Based on your review this morning I looked at while at the grocery store, I purchased this and had it for breakfast today! I was pleasantly surprised by it, including size portion (not too big), acidity and not-too-sweet sauce. Also, the mine was not drowning in sauce as shown in your fist photo, more like the second photo showed. It The meat was fine, cheese was fine. I am now curious about your other reviews and those that rate a bit higher. Thank you!