Pizza Hut claims that its new Tuscani Pastas are restaurant quality.  Well, there are indeed many bad restaurants out in the world.

Friends claim that the first two pastas that Pizza Hut made, Meaty Marinara and Creamy Chicken Alfredo, are pretty decent tasting, with plenty of bang for the buck thanks to the $12.99 price (for ~3 pounds of pasta plus 5 breadsticks).  That may be the case, but I haven't been exposed to them.  Instead, I tried the Premium Bacon Mac 'N Cheese pasta.  Rotini baked with cheddar cheese sauce and topped with bacon. I like rotini and cheddar, and I love bacon.  Sounds good for me, right?

Premium Bacon Mac 'N Cheese is absolutely awful.

If you're really interested in some mac and cheese for dinner and you have $13 bucks lying around, you're much better off running to the local grocery store and grabbing a big box of Stouffer's.  The cheddar cheese flavor in those things isn't brilliant, but it's a lot more satisfying than Pizza Hut's attempt.  The sauce in the Bacon Mac 'N Cheese is repulsive.  It's no wonder that they decided that topping the dish with bacon would be a good idea, and to their credit, the bacon does provide those nearby a vaguely appealing aroma.  That scent is the only good part of the whole dish; there is so little bacon flavor in the pasta that I seriously wonder whether those hard red bits ever had anything remotely porcine about them.  Even texturally, the supposed bacon bits are so fine as to contribute nothing to the texture of the pasta: soft, squishy, almost soupy.

How could they make so bad a pasta?  Not only is bacon one of the simplest magic bullets in the world of cookery, frozen mac and cheese is one of the easiest dishes to get right.  Decades of recipe development and breakthroughs in food industry technology have created a whole world of edible and even enjoyable Italian and faux-Italian dishes.  Pizza Hut obviously has much work to do before they get to anything near what Stouffer's or La Romanella can do, much less genuinely tasty frozen dishes from Michael Angelo's and Bertolli's that can be bought for cheaper and cooked faster than anything needing a delivery boy.