Take it from Garfield: there are few things that compare to biting into a delicious chunk of hot lasagna. So of course we’re going to take any excuse we can get to eat the stuff. And today we’ve got a really, really good excuse: we picked up a box of Trader Joe’s Family Style Meat Lasagna, and we need to eat it so we can write a thorough review.
While you can certainly cook this in the microwave, we felt like this was a pan of lasagna that deserved the full oven treatment. Thankfully, both the microwave and oven cooking methods are supported, and both have instructions on the box. If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review. Keep in mind that no matter how you cook this, it will take quite a bit of time. We spent more than an hour heating this thing up.
This is part of the Trader Giotto’s line, which means Trader Joe’s wants us to take this frozen meal as seriously as we’d take an authentic Italian dish — or at least a meal from Olive Garden. So how does it hold up against those standards?
Well, first off, the cheese here is amazing.
Wait a second, let’s step back. The cheese on top of the lasagna is amazing. It tastes great, it’s thick and stretchy, and it gets wonderfully crisp around the edges. The cheese on the inside isn’t quite as good. It’s a ricotta, but it ends up being a little dry and gravelly, which is not the ideal consistency for ricotta cheese. It’s not terrible, mind you, but we’ve definitely had better ricotta inside frozen lasagnas before.
The sauce is pretty great. It’s not a sweeter tomato sauce — it’s a savory, meaty sauce that actually works pretty well here. It’s filled with a very generous portion of ground beef, which makes it great for meat-lovers. The beef is seasoned well, so the flavor is quite good.
Trader Joe’s considers a tray to be four servings, and we’ve photographed a single serving (shown above) so you can see just how much food that is. If you stick to that recommendation, you’ll end up eating 350 calories (130 from fat) and 920 mg of sodium. While that’s not so bad in the calorie department, the sodium level is through the roof. An we probably don’t need to mention that if you eat more than 1/4 of a pan, these numbers will only get bigger.
The Trader Joe’s Family Style Meat Lasagna is not perfect, but it’s a pretty decent frozen lasagna for the price point. Of course, we’d have to say that Stouffer’s has Trader Joe’s beat in the frozen lasagna department. If you don’t believe us, check out the Stouffer’s Family Size Lasagna Italiano for yourself and compare it against Trader Joe’s offering. We think you’ll agree that Stouffer’s has the edge here.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Trader Joe’s frozen lasagna, check out our package scan below.
