HUNGRY MAN Roasted Carved Turkey Dinner
Ah the first blog post, well since this is the first post of the TV dinner review blog what better item than the first TV dinner ever made to review. Yes I said the first TV dinner. Well not really, as cool as it would be to travel back in time and sample the first Swanson TV dinner of 1953, we'll just have to do the next best thing with a current, modern, new fangled turkey dinner with stuffing of 2008.
Lets see just how well this old timer has held up over the years. Long gone are the quaint aluminum foil 3 compartment containers, now under the Hungry Man label Swanson's Roasted Carved Turkey dinner has grown to a heafty 18.5 ounce single serving size, the outer container boasting over 1 lb. of food. When I see things like that I hear that all knowing voice say 'more isn't going to necessarily be better'.
The meal consists of sliced Turkey mostly white meat, corn, stuffing and a small portion of apple cranberry compote. (What the hell is compote, something to spread on my vegetable garden?)
The Turkey: appears to be about 4 slices of white (breast?) meat (some dark meat as well), how they manage to get such uniform slices apparently without being chopped, pressed, and formed like bologna is impressive. The meat contains a water solution with several different sodium ingredients that indeed makes it moist, very moist, peculiarly moist hmm... and of course salty.
The Corn was reasonably firm, sweet and tasty; Mashed potatoes remarkably smooth with a familiar institutional instant flavor not bad, not great. Brown gravy had the expected faux meaty flavor though was exceptionally salty as is somewhat expected with sauces and gravies of most frozen dinners.
The best item would have to be the stuffing, some parts were firm almost crunchy and other parts nice and soggy with gravy; Has a good holiday stuffing flavor.
The desert compote is as I remember from the 70's TV dinners, just plain wrong. Insanely sweet and tart, I couldn't finish them then and things haven't changed much since.
Worth it's weight in salt?I have high blood pressure and take meds to control it, considering this and the advice of my doctor to avoid highly processed sodium laden foods I decided to only eat half of of the 18.5 oz entree.
After eating just half of the meal all I wanted to do was run to the faucet and drink a copious amount of cool fresh water to flush my dehydrated feeling, salt cured tongue, - not good.
Just how much salt are we talking about here? A staggering 1950 mg (1.95g) of sodium! A full 81% of the recommend daily allowance based on a 2000 daily calorie diet in just one serving. One gram of sodium = 2.5 grams of salt . When you shake salt on your food from a shaker just think how long you would have to shake to make that salt equivalent, almost one full teaspoon that's how much is already in this meal compliments of Pinnacle Foods. If you love salty foods or happen by a cow on a farm enjoying a salt lick and feel deprived because you aren't in there with Betsy goin to town on that lick, this is for you. Sadly I can't recommend this classic frozen meal at all.
Verdict
Because this is a classic throwback to the first TV Dinners and appears to use reasonably good quality ingredients, I'm going to give this a generous overall 2 spork rating (barely palatable). It's a shame that the food tasters used to gauge demographic taste somehow can't taste all the sodium in this product. Value for dollar, $3 Fred Meyers seems average but considering it's disappointing flavor this seems a bit much.
