What will they think of next? We know the gluten-avoiding crowd is creative, but we never expected to see mac and cheese that’s made with chickpeas instead of a traditional pasta. But that’s exactly what those mad scientists did! So when we saw the Lean Cuisine Triple Cheese Macaroni & Cheese Bowl Made with Banza Chickpea Pasta at our local grocery store, we knew right away that we had to try it.
This uses pasta from the Banza brand, which we were unfamiliar with before picking up this meal. Banza, we learned, has a whole line of chickpea-based options, such as pastas and even pizza crust. We’re actually pretty intrigued by all this!
So let’s cook this up. It’s easy enough to do; simply toss the bowl into the microwave for three minutes, give it a stir, then pop it back in for another minute and a half. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from a Lean Cuisine meal. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight from the back of the box, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Now let’s dig in!
Our first big question, of course, was what in the heck does Banza pasta even taste like? Since this is our first encounter with the brand, we were really itching to get to the bottom of this.
It’s actually pretty good. It’s not as firm as a regular pasta, and it has a gravelly consistency, but it does seem to do the trick here. You will get a little bit of that chickpea flavor, but you probably won’t even notice it if you don’t actually clean all the cheese off of a bite like we did for this review.
And speaking of cheese, this is made with a three-cheese blend containing Vermont white cheddar, romano, and parmesan. It’s actually a really good cheese sauce for this particular pasta, as the sharpness of the cheddar complements that subtle chickpea flavor. Quite often, when food-makers substitute one ingredient for another, that ingredient goes to war against the rest of the flavor palate. This leads that food-maker to attempt to mask the substitute by going overboard with another flavor. Here, Lean Cuisine just complemented the chickpea-based pasta with a sauce that works well with it. We admire this choice, and this ends up being a pretty tasty meal as a result.
This isn’t really made for calorie counters. With 510 calories, it’s definitely on the higher end of the calorie spectrum. In fact, we’d say this is almost comparable to a Devour meal in that regard. It seems Lean Cuisine is very willing to cut the lean and focus on the cuisine! This also has 870 mg of sodium, which is a bit high, but it’s not really that high for a frozen meal.
The Lean Cuisine Triple Cheese Macaroni & Cheese Bowl Made with Banza Chickpea Pasta works a lot better than we expected it to. If your a mac-and-cheese fanatic who’s giving up gluten, you should definitely stuff a few of these in your freezer. For anyone else, though, this is still a really tasty, really enjoyable batch of frozen mac. We dig it, and we think you will too!
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this creative take on mac and cheese, check out our package scans below.
