Frozen lasagna is one of my favorite comfort foods. Stouffer’s is usually my favorite - lots of sauce, not too much cheese, good texture, great flavor.
The Marie Callendar’s variety actually has better ingredients than the Stouffer’s and real ricotta cheese, and it’s usually a bit less expensive. It would be my favorite except for one thing - after it’s done cooking (whether microwaved or in the oven), the tray is absolutely full of water. Not runny sauce, just water, slightly pinkish from contact with the sauce and cheese, all along the sides and underneath the lasagna, and it makes the lasagna completely unedible. If I want to actually eat the lasagna, I have to stop the microwave about halfway through, take it to the sink, and drain the water off like it was a pan of freshly cooked hamburger meat, a step that is nowhere on the packaging suggested to be necessary. Even then, I usually have to drain it again after it’s done cooking. Tonight I got over half a cup of water out of it.
Where the hell is all this water coming from? I have never encountered any frozen dinner before, even the cheap-ass Banquet meals, that spontaneously produce that kind of runoff when cooked.
Frozen meals are often engineered to have a certain amount of moisture which evaporates to steam-heat the meal. If there’s that much water left over, your microwave may not be getting it hot enough, or you may not be cooking it long enough. Or it may be that it just sucks.
I’ve had this problem with Marie Callendar’s brand for 10+ years now and with numerous microwaves in several states, so i’m pretty sure it can’t be that. Even if I oven-cook it I still get it swimming in water. Not even other Marie Callender’s meals do this - just the lasagna.
Does the package recommend some standing time? I haven’t tried that brand, but I’ve found that others are a bit soupy sometimes unless you let them stand for 10 minutes or so out of the oven.
-I don’t recall that the instructions have a standing time or not, but in my experience it makes no difference. The only way to deal with the water is to drain it halfway through cooking.
-Oven-cooking the lasagna still produces all this water.
-Taking it out of the tray would probably just lead to it disintegrating when it defrosts and leaving a big puddle of lasagna soup.
-Never have bothered to write to them about it. They actually DID change their lasagna recipe in a big way last year, but didn’t fix the water problem.
I think there’s some money to be made here. With all of the designer “enhanced” waters on the market these days, you might make a killing with something like “MC’s Lasagna Water”!