When I found the gluten-free version of Asian Helper Chicken Fried Rice from Betty Crocker at Publix last year, I was delighted! It wasn’t until the next day that I realized the product contained MSG which is gluten-free, but doesn’t agree with me. I returned the product the next time I went to Publix.
Always a gluten-free sleuth, I decided to pick up the gluten-free version of Hamburger Helper Cheesy Hashbrowns to read the ingredients about a month ago. Imagine my excitement to not find the term MSG or words monosodium glutamate in the ingredients! I double and triple checked the label before throwing the box into my cart.
We’ve now had the gluten-free Cheesy Hashbrowns twice and both times I used ground turkey to make this one dish meal. Like the regular Hamburger Helper meals, it’s easy to prepare. Just brown the meat, add water and the potatoes and eventually, the sauce mixture. What I enjoyed about the dish was the easy preparation and taste. I love meat, potatoes and cheese so it would be hard for me not to appreciate something like Cheesy Hashbrowns with ground turkey.
What it took me a moment to get over was the color of the cheese sauce. You mix a dry powder (that looks like the cheese powder in Kraft mac-n-cheese) with milk and when everything is combined, the color is bright orange. Of course, when the sauce is mixed into the rest of the dish, it’s not bright orange at all. In fact, it’s really not orange at all.
The meal is really good though it’s kind of salty and I’m a salt freak. To negate the overly salty flavor, cut part of a raw potato up and place it in the pot when cooking. This is a Martha Stewart trick that works beautifully. If you don’t have a potato, you can reduce the amount of the sauce powder you use when you make the sauce.
Now that I’ve tried the gluten-free Hamburger Helper, I really wish the Asian Helper meals were also free of MSG. Even though I order chicken fried rice at our favorite Chinese place several times a month, I’d like the option of having a mix to use every once in a while. The Hamburger Helper Cheesy Hashbrowns meal kit is really tasty, easy to prepare and it’s an excellent bargain as well!
*Look for gluten-free Hamburger Helper and Asian Helper at your local grocery store. They are stocked with the regular Hamburger Helper mixes at Publix stores.
I had a hard time getting over the color of the cheese sauce as well.
It is nice to have these options available for decent prices for those that wish to buy them. 🙂 That is what awareness is doing – making more choices available.
I tried both of these, were extremely bland to me, wrote to company, response was perhaps the spices weren’t mixed correctly before leaving factory. I got to thinking, in the time it takes to brown hamburger or turkey, noodles or potatoes could be cooking as well. So I added dried onions, garlic, a few other spices, and a handful of shredded cheese…then these were edible. I told them since I have to cook the meat anyway, might as well make my own ‘helper’. Takes the same amount of time