We were combing through the site the other day, looking through old articles, and we made a startling realization. “Egads!” we shouted in unison. “We’ve never reviewed the Stouffer’s Spaghetti with Meat Sauce! How could we be so blind? What have we become?”
Okay, so that’s a bit dramatic. But we really did recently realize that we’d missed this crucial frozen food review. Considering we’ve done more than 1,600 reviews at this point, and that we’d actually reviewed the oh-so-similar Stouffer’s Spaghetti with Meatballs, perhaps it’s easy to see how something like this could fall through the cracks. Still, now that we’re aware of the omission, it has become our duty to make sure this product is absent from Freezer Meal Frenzy no longer.
So today we’re finally checking out the Stouffer’s Spaghetti with Meat Sauce.
Now, one thing that Stouffer’s isn’t known for is fast cook times. We’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about this, but we’ll bring it up again. This spaghetti has a fairly long cook time — six and a half minutes in the microwave. Now, that’s not going to tie up your home microwave for hours on end, but if you’re at work and sharing a breakroom with a lot of other people, this cook time might make you some lunchtime enemies. Be considerate of your fellow microwave users, folks! (If you want to read the full cooking instructions, you can check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
As you can see in the image above, this actually has a ton of sauce. We’ve seen plenty of frozen pasta dishes that skimp on the sauce, but this is definitely not one of them. This sauce is a bit watery, though. We almost feel like this would be better if you heated it, then put it in the fridge and reheated it later (that would also save you some cook time on the second round, if you still insist that you want to bring this to work with you).
That said, it’s actually a decent-tasting sauce, all things considered. While we do tend to like either a sweeter or spicier red sauce, this one is a more traditional, kind-of-acidic-tasting tomato paste, which works well enough with the meat portion. And that meat is a beef and pork blend. It’s not bad, but it is ground up kind of small, so instead of having chunks of meat, you instead get a kind of gravelly consistency. If you’re not into that, Stouffer’s also makes a version of this with meatballs, so that might be more up your alley.
As far as the pasta itself, it’s your basic spaghetti-style noodle. There are no surprises here; this is exactly what you think it is.
Now, spaghetti isn’t exactly a diet food. With 410 calories, we wouldn’t recommend this for anyone on a strict diet, but we also don’t think it’s super bad for a plate of spaghetti. Plus, the sodium is lower than we expected, at 640 mg. If you want a truly diet-friendly pasta, you might be interested in the Smart Made Roasted Vegetables with Angel Hair Pasta or the Scott & Jon’s Pesto Penne with Vegetables, both of which come in at under 300 calories. If 410 calories sounds reasonable, though, you could do much worse than this Stouffer’s batch of spaghetti.
The Stouffer’s Spaghetti with Meat Sauce will knock out a spaghetti craving, but it’s certainly not perfect. We don’t have any serious complaints, however, and what’s here is good enough to satisfy our spaghetti-loving appetites. We do think we prefer this with meatballs instead of meat sauce, but that’s just a matter of personal preference. Some folks might feel the opposite.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen spaghetti, check out our package scans below.
