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Tag: Rana

Rana Chicken Marsala Linguine Meal Kit Review

November 2, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Yikes!

I continue my cooking strike (which is now only set to last until I empty out my refrigerator), so when I saw this Rana Chicken Marsala Linguine meal kit on sale at the supermarket for $, I thought I’d give it a try. Rana usually has good products, but I’ll say they really missed the mark here.

The kit comes with a bag of semi-cooked pasta and a bag of sauce. You mix the pasta and sauce in the plastic bowl provided and then you microwave. Each kit serves one person, and the portion was generous (or it felt that way due to how unappetizing it was).

The results weren’t good. First, the pasta was too salty and a bit undercooked, but that’s relatively minor. The real problem was the strange and off taste of the sauce. I can’t quite identify it, but it brought me five decades back to when we visited friends of my parents for dinner and they served us ravioli with a similarly horrible taste. They tasted hollow, as if flavor had been replaced by a vacuum, but they also reminded me of chlorine. Ultimately, I thought it might be dirt – perhaps the off note was really from the mushrooms. There were, don’t get me wrong, some hints of marsala sauce – when putting a bite in my mouth I could feel the delicious umami taste of chicken marsala coming, only for the hope to disappear at the first bite and become saltiness and dearth.

The chicken, meanwhile, was also unpleasant. It was tough, having that weird chewy consistency of microwaved and/or texturized chicken, and just being unplesant to bite.

All in all, this was a failure. I’d be curious to see if other flavors are just as bad, but not enough to risk biting into that chicken again.

See other pasta reviews.

Rana Smoked Beef Brisket Ravioli Review

October 30, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Another interesting flavor

Not too long ago, Rana introduced several unusually flavored refrigerated ravioli, and I’ve been trying them when they go on sale. They make a quick and generally tasty meal.

These Smoked Beef Brisket Ravioli are filled with smoked beef brisket in a very tasty BBQ sauce. They are quite similar to the pulled pork ravioli I reviewed previously, but the flavor is milder and therefore better suited to the medium. I served them with butter & sage (I melted some butter in a skillet, added sage leaves and then added the boiled ravioli) and that worked well. I don’t think the ravioli would work with a tomato or cheese based sauce, though perhaps they would go with a cream (maybe and mustard?) one. Plain butter works as well.

The 8 oz package has 1 1/2 portions, which makes it a very awkward size, unless you’re feeding yourself and a child. These ravioli are 2-bite sized, but if feeding a young child you could pre-cut them for them or serve them as finger food, though the filling is prone to spilling out.

I probably will buy these again when they go on sale for $5 (normally $8 at Safeway).

See other pasta reviews.

De Cecco Potato Gnocchi & Rana Alfredo Sauce Review

October 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Both are good, but not together

I love gnocchi, but only when they are light and fluffy, with the right proportion of potato to flour. Because it is hard to get it right, I never make gnocchi – so it’s usually something I eat at restaurants. You can, however, buy pre-made, ready-to-boil gnocchi and once in a while I get them. They are OK, but not great.

De Cecco potato gnocchi ($2.50 on sale from $4) are among the best of the bunch. They are pretty light, though still heavier than I would like. Flavor wise, they are a little too bitter and in need of another pinch of nutmeg, but they are not bad. They do cook very fast (mine are overcooked in the photo).

Ingredients are dried potato flakes, potato starch, flour, rice flour, spices, salt, lactid acid.

I served the gnocchi with Rana Alfredo Sauce ($3 on sale from $6), sold refrigerated. I have liked this sauce before, but it didn’t really vibe well with the gnocchi, the combination had an unpleasantish bitter flavor. The sauce is pretty good as a dipping sauce, and I would buy it again, but not serve it with gnocchi.

It’s made with cream, parmigiano reggiano, onions, pecorino romano, food starch, natural flavors, salt, autolyzed yeast extract, garlic and spice.

See other reviews of pasta & pasta sauces

Rana Pulled Pork Ravioli is … interesting

June 27, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I love ravioli. It’s been my favorite pasta since I was a kid. Indeed, it was the only pasta I liked as a kid. This love comes from the fact that my grandparents used to make homemade ravioli, and they celebrated my first birthday with a raviolada, I love seeing the photos of my with a face full of sauce.

Short of having my grandmother make ravioli, I only had ravioli growing up when my father would buy the fresh pasta at a nearby pasta factory. But it was expensive. My parents were thrifty, so it was a special occurrence.

In the US (and in Argentina nowadays), you could get frozen ravioli for a reasonable price, so they were one of the first dishes I started “making” after I got married. I still always keep a bag of frozen ravioli in the fridge just in case.

With time, supermarkets started selling higher quality refrigerated ravioli, and recently Rana has moved into selling these “gourmet”-style ravioli, with unusual/special fillings. They were on sale this week ($5 for the 8 oz package, down from $8 regular price), so I grabbed a couple of bags.

I hadn’t had the pulled pork ravioli before and I was sort of puzzled by them – I still am. The pulled pork filling is very tasty, it has a strong, but balanced, BBQ pork flavor and stands well to the pasta. The flavor of fillings in ravioli often gets lost, but that is not the case here. Still, it was not clear to me why I was eating pulled pork inside a ravioli. The flavor/texture combination wasn’t really obvious and I’m still not sure that it worked. Again, it was tasty but it was weird.

I usually eat commercial ravioli with store-bought pasta sauce, but I didn’t think the flavor combinations would work here, so I tried these ravioli with butter – that worked well enough. I think brown butter and sage would work as well, though I was too lazy to make it last night. I did try it with some grated pecorino cheese, but the cheese does nothing here but confuse flavors – it’s definitely best left out. You do need butter or sauce as otherwise the ravioli get too sticky/gummy.

The other issue I have with these ravioli is the package size. The 8 oz package is supposed to offer two servings of one cup each. But unless you are serving them as an appetizer or along other dishes, or simply are not very hungry, a cup of ravioli is too little. Two cups, however, is too much unless you are actually very hungry. Now, the package might be perfect if you are making dinner for yourself and a young child, but that’s no longer my case. I wish they would increase the size to 12 oz, or perhaps decrease it to 6 oz. That said, $5 for a gourmet tasting meal is definitely not a bad price.

The ravioli themselves are pretty large – the kind you need to cut in two in order to fit into your mind. Obviously you can do this with a fork, but I personally prefer smaller ravioli.

I might buy these again to feed to my husband, who just loves pulled pork. But really, I wish Rana would just sell their pulled pork to eat in a sandwich, that feels more natural.

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