Gwynedd Stuart
Marie Callender’s frozen meals take up a lot of real estate in the frozen aisle. The brand, which spun off from a chain of restaurants (24 locations still exist!) when Conagra licensed the name in 1994, was most closely associated with pies and pot pies when it launched. But it’s expanded over the years—a lot. Now, for better or worse, they sell everything from fettuccine alfredo to sweet and sour chicken. Honestly, if you’re looking for the best Marie Callender’s frozen meals, you should stick with the classics.
Before you yell at me, no, we didn’t try all of the Marie Callender’s frozen meals—there are simply too many to eat in one taste test—but we did try 13 of them. We’ll try more of them, including their line of microwavable bowls, in our next taste test. But for now, these are the best Marie Callender’s frozen meals.
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- Marie Callender’s Salisbury Steak
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This is one of those Marie Callender’s frozen meals that tastes better than it looks. The Salisbury steak patty comes with mac and cheese, as well as a side of nude hunks of potato. The roasted potatoes, which were downright bad in other meals we tried, were actually pretty good here—tender and seasoned rather than dense, grainy, and flavorless. The mac and cheese tastes like almost nothing, but if you mix it up with the beefy, salty gravy and take bites of it with the steak, it’s satisfying slop.
Credit: Merc / Walmart
- Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie
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As Marie Callender’s pot pies go, the chicken pot pie is good, but it’s not the best Marie Callender’s pot pie (see #1 for that). It tastes like chicken chowder in a crust and that’s nice. The filling lacks poultry flavor and it’s almost like you can taste the flour they used in the roux to make the gravy, but Marie knows her way around a flaky, buttery pot pie crust, so this is still good despite its shortcomings.
Credit: Merc / Walmart
- Marie Callender’s Fettuccini with Chicken & Broccoli
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A lot of the time, the alfredo sauce in frozen dinners is pretty much just congealed salty milk. But the sauce in Marie Callender’s Fettuccini with Chicken & Broccoli actually has some cheesy funk—it tastes like it involves some parmesan cheese. The pasta is good, too, although, we’ll never fully understand why frozen food brands refer to their pasta as “freshly made”—like, what does that mean?? Made fresh in a factory, I guess. It needs about twice as much broccoli (why skimp?) and it would be nice if the chicken had more flavor, but this is still one of the best Marie Callender’s frozen meals simply by virtue of being pretty okay.
Credit: Merc / Target
- Marie Callender’s Roasted Turkey Breast & Stuffing
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The stuffing in this meal is so, so gummy—but it sure tastes good. It tastes like sage and has a little bit of a dried herb, catnip sort of flavor. Plus, we love the turkey in Marie Callender’s meals. It’s fibrous like actual turkey meat rather than being spongy and reformed like the chicken and beef in these meals. This savory turkey dinner is much, much better than the honey glazed turkey—that weird, sweet sauce was a hard no from us.
Credit: Merc / Target
- Marie Callender’s Country Fried Chicken & Gravy
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This doesn’t have nearly as much gravy as we’d like, but the chicken patty is soft rather than tough and the breading tastes like good, peppery chicken nugget breading. The corn is less tough than the corn in the meatloaf meal. The gravy just kind of mixes with the mashed potatoes and disappears, which isn’t great, but that’s life.
Credit: Merc / Walmart
- Marie Callender’s Turkey Pot Pie
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I can’t stress enough: Marie Callender’s turkey pot pie is so much better than the chicken pot pie! The savory gravy, there’s lots of vegetables, and you get nice big chunks of turkey that actually taste like poultry. (We got the large size, so we can’t speak to the gravy ratio in the regular one.) We also couldn’t believe that the crust crisps up in the microwave. I thought it would be mush but it actually has some bite. This is a thoughtful meal, like someone actually cared, and we definitely couldn’t say that for a lot of Marie Callender’s frozen meals.
Marie Callender’s!
Marie Callender’s
Marie Callender’s!
Marie Callender’s
Marie Callender’s
Marie Callender’s!
Other Marie Callender’s frozen meals we tried: Sweet & Sour Chicken, Slow Roasted Beef, Steak & Roasted Potatoes, Chicken Marinara, Honey Roasted Turkey Breast, Beef Pot Pie, Lemon Herb Grilled Chicken
Madison Ramirez
Matt Crowley
Luke Field
