If the point was to help people eat whole grain, this product is self-defeating.
Written: Mar 06 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Made with whole wheat and real cheese.
Cons: Tastes bad, directions call for margarine and incorrect amount of liquid, sticky texture.
The Bottom Line: Buy whole grain pasta, make sauce, and avoid this gummy, runny, stale-tasting product.
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| bkalafut's Full Review: Knorr-Lipton Whole Grain Pasta Sides |
When I was a student at Tulane, I knew some people--mainly architecture students and similar insomniacs--who seemed to live off of something called Easy Mac, eating it at any hour of the day. Growing up I consumed quite a few convenience foods (thankfully, mainly as side dishes)--[foo]-Roni, spice-packet and ground-round tacos, blue-box Kraft mac-n-cheese--but Easy Mac topped them all. If there really could be such a thing as poor-man's instant macaroni and cheese, or perhaps the instant macaroni and cheese of the astronauts, Easy Mac was it. Cardboard tasting noodles made from ultrarefined flour, with a tendency to stick to one another in a glue-like mess, covered with a sauce reminiscent of stale Chee-Tos with extra salt, they were as unhealthy and unappetizing as could be, with, unlike ramen, no way of improving them.
Knorr-Lipton Whole Grain Pasta Sides, despite package-label boasts of being "one whole serving" of whole grains, are a lot like Easy Mac.
The noodles cook too much when package directions are followed, causing them to become soft and clump together, an effect aided by the sauce. Moreover, they taste a lot like cardboard. The sauce is even worse--the two cups of liquid called for in the microwave directions are over twice as much as this needs, yielding a runny, sickly looking mess with clumpy noodles buried in it somewhere.
A runny, sickly, bad-tasting mess, at that. Despite containing real parmesan and romano cheeses, the "alfredo" sauce was barely distinguishable from that of any other convenience mac-and-cheese and was closer to Easy Mac's stale flavor than to the pungent "is this a petroleum byproduct" zip of Kraft or Wacky Mac. Even if the package directions were fixed to call for the proper amount of liquid, that wouldn't fix the taste.
To top things off, margarine (specifically, Unilever brandmates Country Crock and I Can't Believe it's Not Butter)--one of the most unhealthy foods--is called for in the directions instead of butter or oil. Traditional margarine contains a lot of saturated fats and, even worse, a lot of those are trans-saturated. Some of the monounsaturated spreads may be healthier than butter and the engineered Smart Balance is possibly as good as olive or canola oil, but most margarine is just plain bad, outweighing any benefit from whole grains.
Not that Knorr-Lipton's Pasta Sides will encourage anyone to eat whole grains, anyway. At least Easy Mac was never promoted as being healthy.
For promotional purposes, Fleishman-Hillard sent me a sample of Knorr-Lipton Whole Grain Pasta Sides in exchange for my fair and honest review.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
bkalafut
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 in Restaurants & Gourmet |
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Member: Bennett Kalafut
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Reviews written: 258
Trusted by: 42 members
About Me:
Stretching single molecules for fun and profit.
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