We keep coming back to the Michelina’s brand of frozen food. Not only are their meals super, super cheap (we’re talking $1.50 or less) and low in calories, but we’ve found some pretty tasty items in their lineup. Of course, not everything in the line is great — we’ve found some real stinkers — and we freely admit these aren’t gourmet meals. Still, for the price, you could certainly do a lot worse.
We’ve tried a couple different varieties of Michelina’s mac and cheese already, and today we’re checking out yet another one. Yes, today we’re cramming our faces with the Michelina’s Cheeseburger Mac.
Cooking this is super simple. Break open one corner, then microwave the box for three minutes. Pull it out, stir the macaroni, and pop it back in for two more minutes. It’s super simple. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
To keep the manufacturing costs down, Michelina’s doesn’t include an inner tray, meaning the outer box is also the tray. This means these don’t last as long in the freezer as many of their counterparts in the frozen-food world. Plus, you’ll have to eat these meals straight out of the cardboard box. But really, these are cheap enough that it’s not worth complaining about.
The cheese here is a cheddar club cheese, which is different from the cheddar and romano combo of the last Michelina’s macaroni that we tried. This stuff is a bit runnier, and it has a bit of a plastic aftertaste to it. There’s a decent enough cheddary flavor here, but the aftertaste is a little unpleasant.
The thing that makes this stand out, of course, is the addition of hamburger chunks. Unfortunately, they taste like cheap, leftover meatloaf. They have that overly oniony taste, which is so often used to mask the true flavor of super-cheap ground beef. This beef is also really salty tasting. We don’t really like the meat in this meal, and we could have probably done without it. Some people will appreciate the protein content, we suppose, but it’s really not for us.
This meal contains 280 calories, which makes it super diet-friendly for calorie-counters. The sodium is a bit high, however, at 950 mg. Of course, this is also a pretty tiny amount of food.
The Michelina’s Cheeseburger Mac isn’t terrible, but it’s a pretty low-quality macaroni dish. We think the other two mac and cheese meals we’ve tried from Michelina’s are better choices than this one. If you really want salty chunks of meat in your macaroni, this is for you. But if you’re a normal human being, you might want to skip this for some of the better options out there.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen macaroni dish, check out our package scan below.
