Dr. Gourmet's Food Reviews

Trader Joe’s Organic Pesto Tortellini

Organic Pesto Tortellini and Spinach Lasagna

It's been a couple of years since we last reviewed anything from Trader Joe's. There's a Trader Joe's quite close to the new location of Dr. Gourmet International Headquarters, so it seemed time to visit them again to see what they had in the way of frozen meals that fit our criteria.

This time we found several items: today we have two pasta dishes - Pesto Tortellini and Spinach Lasagna - and in a few weeks we'll review two other items.

Today we started our tasting session with Trader Joe's Organic Pesto Tortellini, which has 360 calories, 520 milligrams of sodium, and just 1 gram of fiber.

This dish smells great.

It has a luscious pesto scent that's full of basil, parmigiano, and garlic. It smells as every good pesto dish should. Unfortunately, it doesn't deliver.

It's a pretty simple dish: tortellini filled with cheese. A basil pesto sauce. And the dish falls down on both. The pesto sauce is "more basil-scented than flavored," and the tortellini contain "only the smallest amount of cheese." Some of the tortellini are cooked al dente, some are mushy, and some that ended up at the package's edges are actually hard enough to break teeth. We might let the texture if the flavor were there, but it's not.

Worse yet, this dish has 20 grams of fat: fully half of the calories in this dish come from fat. As a panelist described it: "With that much fat I should be swimming in cheesey goodness."

We're not. Don't bother with this one.

The Spinach Lasagna is "a whole 'nother story."

This has fewer calories and more sodium than the tortellini, at just 340 calories and 620 milligrams of sodium, but it has far more fiber (4 grams) and a little less fat (18 total grams of fat).

The first thing we noticed upon reading the ingredients list is that spinach is the first ingredient. By law the listing of ingredients must be in descending order by weight, which means that there is more spinach in this dish than any other single ingredient.

You can't tell in the picture above, which is of the dish immediately after coming out of the microwave, but this dish is impressively full of spinach. The overwhelming majority of the filling in this dish is a mix of cooked, chopped spinach mixed with diced onions and laced with just a little ricotta. The dish has a fantastic spinach flavor that's complemented with a bright, tart tomato sauce - again, just enough sauce for flavor.

The only down side to this dish is that the pasta might be a little overdone, but to be honest, that's not surprising in a frozen lasagna dish.

If you're not a spinach fan, this is not for you. If you like spinach, however, our panel says "SOOOO spinachy good!" Some of the best frozen lasagna we've ever had.

Read all reviews from Trader Joe's »

Review posted: February 21, 2020