Part I: Keckler, Bertolli, And The Zone Defense
Let's get something straight; I enjoy frozen meals. In fact, there are some I flat-out love, crave, hanker and yearn for. You want some instances? Well, my freezer has to have at least four Tina's burritos (green chile only), I bewail the inaccessibility of Byerly's Beer Cheese Soup, Trader Joe's stocks some of the best siu mai I've ever had, and I've still never hit upon a restaurant macaroni and cheese that even comes close to the creaminess and flavor of Stouffer's. Believe me, I've looked.
I tell you this so you know I didn't walk into this taste-test with any palate-blocking snobbery. In fact, after being inundated with the friggin' IQF PDF EMP ING process on most recent episode of Top Chef, I was so fascinated by the concept of these Bertolli skillet meals that I knew I had to experiment with them for myself. Oh, but I had no illusions of recreating a Bertolli frozen meal from scratch as the cheftestants were made to do -- no way. I just wanted to see the pasta nests and sauce blocks for myself, how they cooked up, if they were even edible. Having availed myself of a good selection of these bags that would showcase different pastas, proteins, and sauces, I started skilleting.
Side note: I find it rather singular that, unlike on both versions of The Apprentice, part of the win was not to have Bertolli snatch up the winning creation and use it as a new flavor for their line. It's like they knew the cheftestants would rather lose than have their recipes used to make frozen dinners. Frankly, I'm willing to bet that all of the cheftestants' offerings were far tastier and much better for you than anything Bertolli puts out in this line.
After dumping out the Chicken Alfredo & Fettuccine, I marveled over the perfectly cut pieces of frozen Alfredo sauce. They were about a 1/4-inch thick and looked like slices of jack cheese. (All of the segmented sauces enthralled me to a weird degree. I had to squelch an odd desire to play with them like blocks.) Unfortunately, the bag and contents smelled way too much like sour-cream-and-onion Pringles for me to have any faith that this was going to taste like anything other than salt.
I was right. The end result of this particular dish was that the nested pasta cooked up fine, but the Alfredo sauce was more like Alfredo butter, and a grainy Alfredo butter at that. I attribute that delightful texture to the "milk powder" I found listed in the contents. This Bertolli meal serves two people and packs a whopping 710 calories (over half of those calories come from fat) and a scary 1370 mg of sodium. PER SERVING! Sure, you don't know what you're getting in a restaurant, calorie-wise, and chefs do like to pack on the butter and salt for both flavor and mouth appeal, but if I'm going to consume those calories it damn well better be worth it and not leave grainy, watery white puddles on the plate that suddenly make Bourdain's comment about "Rocco's Frozen Love Juice" way too vivid for comfort. Stouffer's makes a way better Fettuccine Alfredo where you don't even have to deal with flaccid chicken pieces that manage to be both wet and too dry at the same time.
up was the Italian Sausage with Rigatoni. It wasn't awful, but a few slices of the faker-than-fake-tasting sausages stuck together throughout the whole cooking process -- even with the recommended stir halfway through -- and ended up being cold in the middle. Rocco would be trying to tell them something without telling them something. The red sauce had a nice fresh taste, but both my stomach and the clear orange pools on the surface of the sauce itself told me that it was unnecessarily oily.
Finally, the dubious best of the bunch: the Spicy Shrimp Fra Diavolo & Penne. Straight from the bag to the skillet, the shrimp are the blushing pink of the already cooked. Not a problem and not a surprise, since shrimp are one of the few seafood items whose quality doesn't suffer from freezing. Admittedly, a few of these little bugs definitely had that funky summer-swimming-pool taste that smacked of sodium tripolyphosphate.
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Although the entire dish was again too salty for my taste, the sauce was fairly flavorful and had a modest amount of heat to warrant the "diavolo." Nutrition-wise, this was the dubious best of the bunch, topping out at a mere 410 calories per serving. However, the sodium content was still 1000+ mg per serving.
Both the Italian Sausage with Rigatoni and the Fettuccine Al-fraido came with wine pairing suggestions, which is a nice touch. However, I disagree that Chardonnay should be paired with the heart-stopping Fettuccine. No, with that you'd want to drink a big glass of -- wait, what varietal did they serve at the Last Supper again?
All in all, these meals aren't for me. They're definitely easy to prepare and their cooking instructions are only off by a few measly minutes, but their faked flavors just aren't worth the calories, fat, or sodium, and I'd much rather go for frozen Kashi meals or make my own stuff. Because even if you're using jarred tomato sauce (which I often do), at least you can control the seasonings and make sure you aren't getting stuffed with more chemically engineered preservatives than Rocco's hairline.
But you don't need to take my word for it; go out and Bertolli your own dinner. Just make sure you drink vats of water and have plenty of Pepto on hand for the recoil of this industrial seasoning-packed gut cannon.
Part II: Sars's Bird's-Eye View
It's difficult to disappoint me, frozen-entrée-wise. As a nationally ranked lazy, impatient spinster, I don't care nearly as much about flavor profiles when dinnertime rolls around as I do about the ability to prepare a large quantity of starchy food in under 10 minutes.
But it's difficult to impress me, too. I eat a lot of frozen food; most of it is…you know. Fine. Inoffensive, unmemorable, forgotten ten minutes after I put the plate in the sink. The only aspect of a given dish I tend to keep in mind is how involved it is to prepare, and if it's a whole procedure with the stirring and the two settings on the microwave and the weird silvery cardboard plate thingie under the pizza and I could have made a stir-fry from scratch in less time, it's not a brand I buy again.
I believe I grabbed a bag of Birds Eye Voila!™ Garlic Shrimp for that very reason -- the bag promised I'd have a healthy meal in 10 minutes. I don't know about "healthy," but the prep is a cinch: huck the contents into a covered frying pan, add a tablespoon of water, stir occasionally, wolf down at desk while answering emails. (That last part may not appear on the packaging.)
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In its frozen state, the meal looks a little bit sci-fi, but all the components -- shrimp, carrots, broccoli, corn, and rotini -- come out loose, not in a big old frozen-together chunk. The rotini has good definition for frozen pasta, not too rigid, not flattened out. The rotini also appears to be pre-seasoned with the garlic-parsley Alfredoid sauce, while all the non-pasta components are noticeably larger than what you usually get in a frozen meal of this type -- the shrimp probably can't count on a gig at Brooklyn Fish Camp or anything, but "comparatively non-pathetic" is actually strong praise here. And it's not, like, three shrimp, a few carrot juliennes, and two florets of broccoli; it's about two parts non-pasta to three parts pasta, not a bad ratio.
The cooking instructions work. This is not always the case, especially when the cook in question lives in an apartment whose floors are tilted about five degrees (rice, for example, is simply impossible for me to cook evenly on the stove), but I don't have any problems, though I'd probably use a splash more water the time. The meal is big coming out of the bag, but cooks down significantly; on the plus side, that indicates that the vegetables were frozen fresh, so they're shrinking down as a result. On the minus side, I come from Indiana farm people, so the package's assertion that what's in the pan makes 3.5 servings is kind of hilarious (I ate the whole thing).
It smells pretty good -- although my nose tells me that "garlic" actually means "garlic powder," and the ingredients list confirms it -- and even better, in eight and a half minutes, it's done.
The final product: better than "fine," for sure. Definitely above average, especially the vegetables, which are just cooked enough and still quite tasty. To my palate, it needs some pepper, but to my palate, just about everything needs some pepper -- I'd pepper my boyfriend if I could get him to hold still long enough -- so your mileage may vary.
It won't fool anyone that it's homemade, but overall, a solid B.
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