Banquet buffalo chicken mac and cheese cooking instructions

We’ve been writing frozen food reviews for years now, so it seems strange to us (and to many of our readers, we’re sure) that we’ve never touched the Banquet line of frozen food. We’re really not sure how that happened, but it’s a mistake we intend to correct.

So today we’re going to crack open the Banquet line by reviewing the Banquet Buffalo-Style Chicken Mac ‘n Cheese Mega Bowl. We love mac and cheese, and we especially love buffalo mac and cheese, so we’re pretty excited to see how this goes.

This takes a bit longer to cook than we were hoping it would. You’ll pop it into the microwave for four minutes, then give it a quick stir and pop it back in for two to two and a half minutes longer. That’s a total of six to six and a half minutes, which is a bit on the long side for a microwavable meal. You could also go with the oven if you really want to extend that cook time, as that will take you almost an hour. (We just microwaved ours for this review, as we didn’t see any point in baking this for 50 minutes — and we were hungry.)

After all that, this comes out of the microwave smelling incredibly delicious. As soon as that scent hit our nostrils, we forgave Banquet for the long cook time.

That scent is due to the buffalo sauce, which this dish is loaded with. It’s a little runnier than we’d like a mac and cheese sauce to be, but it’s super rich and it tastes really great. There’s also some cheddar cheese sauce mixed in as well, so it’s not a straight buffalo sauce, as well a little bit of mozzarella to provide some stretchiness, but that doesn’t thicken it up quite enough for us. Still, we can’t deny that it tastes great.

It’s also spicier than we were expecting. We found our sinuses to be clearing out almost immediately after we started eating this. Hardcore spice fanatics probably won’t be impressed, but if you’re looking for something a bit on the spicier side, this should satisfy.

The chicken doesn’t turn out so well, unfortunately. While some of the buffalo chicken mac and cheese we’ve sampled has thick breaded chicken chunks, this features smaller cuts that aren’t breaded at all. It also has kind of a generic flavor — not a blandness, mind you, but a sort-of-fake taste that we’re not fans of.

The noodles are your classic elbow shape, and we’ve got no complaints there. These won’t knock your socks off, but they do they’re job exactly as they should.

Now buckle up, Buttercup, because we’re going to talk about the nutrition content. With 490 calories, this is certainly not going to appeal to dieters. But if you think that’s bad, you should check out the sodium level. This meal contains 2,130 mg of sodium, which might be the highest amount of sodium we’ve ever seen in a single-serve frozen meal.

The Banquet Buffalo-Style Chicken Mac ‘n Cheese Mega Bowl isn’t perfect, but it’s a perfectly competent bowl of macaroni. The sauce is spicy and tastes great, but the chicken is pretty mediocre. It all balances out, but with a better chicken portion, this would really be incredible. As is, it’s not going to knock Devour’s take on this same dish off of its pedestal.

To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen mac and cheese, check out our package scans below.