We’ve been pretty happy with Stouffer’s Bowl-Fulls line of frozen foods, which seems to be Stouffer’s answer to the Devour brand (which we love). So far, we’ve tried the Spicy Italian Sausage Pasta and the Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta, and both were pretty good. So we’re looking forward to today’s frozen food, the Stouffer’s Southwest Style Mac & Cheese Bowl-Full.
One of the things we’ve noticed about Stouffer’s meals is they tend to take an unusually long time to cook. Their Lasagna Italiano, for example, requires a full eight minutes of cook time. The Southwest Style Mac & Cheese is no exception; it requires a total of seven minutes in the microwave. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out our package scan at the bottom of this review.)
After all that cook time, you’ll end up with a meal that is quite a bit different than the one pictured on the box. The meal on the package is a creamy-looking mac and cheese that’s topped with a bit of chili. What you actually get is just a bowl of chili that has a few macaroni noodles in it. Plus, it smells like fishing tackle.
Now, we don’t often read customer reviews before we try a frozen food, because we don’t want those to subconsciously influence our review. This was one rare exception. Thankfully, we saw that this meal had really bad customer reviews before we attempted to cook it, so we had already prepared for what we were getting into. If you go into this one blind, however, you’ll be in for quite a shock.
While we don’t think the quality of this meal justifies the bombardment of one-star reviews it’s received, we really can’t say this mac and cheese — or bowl of chili, to be more accurate — holds up to the standards set by the other Bowl-Fulls we’ve tried.
This is really just a generic-tasting chili. It’s pretty watery and the macaroni noodles are soggy. There are some black beans floating around in the mix, but they’re far rarer than we’d expect from a chili. The ground beef tastes kind of stale, and it has a gravely texture that’s really off-putting. And worst of all, there are weird plastic undertones to the flavor profile.
Like the other meals in the Bowl-Fulls line, this is a diet-destroying demon. One bowl of this stuff contains 520 calories (230 from fat) and 1,350 mg of sodium. And the mediocre quality of the meal means it isn’t even worth putting all that inside your body.
The Stouffer’s Southwest Style Mac & Cheese Bowl-Full is nothing like the picture on the box, and it doesn’t taste very good either. If you want to dig into the Stouffer’s Bowl-Fulls line, skip this one and head straight for the Spicy Italian Pasta.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Stouffer’s Bowl-Full, check out our package scans below.
