If you’re looking for a super low-cost fettuccine, it’s going to be hard to beat Michelina’s Fettuccine Alfredo — at least in the price department. At our local grocery store, this dinner is priced at $1.39, and we got ours on sale for a dollar. A frozen pasta for a buck? You’d better believe it!
So we decided to see how good this actually is. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by Michelina’s in the past, so we were hoping this would be a somewhat decent frozen pasta.
The Michelina’s Fettuccine Alfredo is super easy to cook. Break open the corner of the package, then microwave it for three minutes. Give it a quick littler stir, then toss it back in for another 60 to 90 seconds. Easy peasy, lemon-squeezy! (To read the full cooking instructions straight off the back of the box, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
One of the things that Michelina’s does to keep their prices so low is to exclude the inner tray that you’d find in a Lean Cuisine or Stouffer’s meal. As you can see in the image above, the box also serves as the tray, so you’ll be eating this straight out of the cardboard container.
What you’ll also notice in the above image is that this is way more watery than it should be. The sauce ends up turning into a soupy mess, which is a really bad thing when it comes in a cardboard container. This could start soaking through the container if you don’t slurp it up quickly enough.
We actually think the cardboard container is part of the problem here. Because the package is cardboard, without any sort of plastic film or anything, the container isn’t as watertight as it needs to be for freezer storage. That means frost builds up inside the meal over time. When you finally cook it up, the water mixes with the sauce to make a soupy concoction rather than a creamy sauce. We honestly didn’t leave this sitting in our freezer for all that long — perhaps two weeks — though we’re not sure how long this had been sitting in the freezer at the grocery store. We did eat it long before the expiration date, though, so this shouldn’t have been a problem.
As far as flavor, the sauce doesn’t taste all that bad. It’s super watered-down, which means it has less flavor than it could, and it’s not creamy at all. You can actually taste the noodles through the sauce, because the sauce’s flavor is so weak. Still, it’s not as bad as it looks.
One thing we’d like to do as an experiment is cook this up, then store it in a plastic container in the fridge overnight and reheat it the next day. This might actually clear up some of the moisture issue and thicken up the sauce a bit. Straight out of the freezer, though, this is a watery, soupy mess.
One container of this pasta contains 250 calories and 680 mg of sodium. Both of those numbers are lower than average for a frozen meal, so it’s nice to see something that’s both budget- and diet-friendly at the same time.
The Michelina’s Fettuccine Alfredo is a mostly edible budget pasta. This is definitely not something we’d recommend, but we only paid a dollar for it so we can’t complain too much. While it’s not anywhere near the same price range, we’d much rather be chomping the Stouffer’s Fettuccini Alfredo, which is a really impressive frozen pasta. The Michelina’s meal we tried today, however, is a somewhat edible mess that hardly costs anything. You get what you pay for, we suppose.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Michelina’s frozen pasta, check out out package scan below.
