Some of the frozen meals in Stouffer’s Classics line really hit the spot. At Freezer meal Frenzy, we’re big fans of the Turkey Tetrazzini and the Fettuccini Alfredo. So we wondered if Stouffer’s Escalloped Chicken & Noodles could keep the winning streak alive.
One thing we complain about quite often is how unusually long Stouffer’s expects us to microwave their meals. This one is no exception at seven and a half minutes of required cook time. We found the plastic film especially difficult to remove, adding even more prep time. And then it comes out piping hot, so there is some waiting time even after all that cooking is done.
But finally, you’ll have a meal that’s ready to eat. Whew!
Now, to be perfectly honest, we never thought to wonder about what the word escalloped means until we cooked up this dish. All that cook time gave us plenty of time to ponder this mystery, and we learned that it can mean a chopped or thinly sliced meat cooked into a sauce and often topped with crumbs, or it can mean a food cooked with scallop shells. The Stouffer’s Escalloped Chicken & Noodles is the first of those things; there is no seafood in this dish, but there is plenty of sauce, as well as a nice crumb topping.
We found the white meat chicken — which is chopped into chunks rather than thinly sliced — to be especially dull here. It’s a little dry and it doesn’t have much flavor. Thankfully, there are plenty of noodles and some halfway decent sauce — which bathes everything in a flavor that has vague hints of chicken soup broth in it. The crumbs really add a lot of flavor here too, as well as some much needed crunch.
If you’ve eaten a lot of casseroles — as we definitely have here at Freezer Meal Frenzy — then it’s quite possible you’ve developed an intense hatred of celery. Whenever you dig into a delicious casserole, you always end up finding a bunch of celery that’s just there to muck things up. That’s true for this dish as well. Plus, the celery is sliced rather thick so it’s impossible to ignore like a more thinly sliced veggie would have been.
There are a few bits of mushrooms, though, and they are fantastic. We would have gladly traded the celery in this dish for more mushrooms. There are peas and carrots as well, but those are so scarce that they’re barely worth mentioning.
This isn’t a terribly fattening meal, but it’s also outside the range of what we’d call diet-friendly. One serving of this has 420 calories (180 from fat), and one box is considered a single serving (unlike some of Stouffer’s other dishes). This is pretty high in sodium, at 980 mg, so be careful if you’re trying to keep your sodium levels low.
Stouffer’s Escalloped Chicken & Noodles is a halfway decent meal, but with some better chicken and less celery it could have been amazing.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
