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We are a family-owned company with a 30-year heritage of creating the highest quality Italian entrées in the freezer aisle. Our founders are Michael Angelo and his mother, Sara, and every box carries our family name. Like any good son, Michael believes that sharing Sara's home-style Italian cooking is the best way to deliver quality and convenience to anyone who truly cares about what they eat. In our family, authentic, Italian taste is everything.
Many of our customers and fans ask us how we pack so much authentic, homemade taste into a box. From generations of family recipes to our relentless pursuit of the best ingredients, you can see for yourself how Michael Angelo's has evolved. It all started with Michael's belief that Sara makes the best Italian food in the world. After telling our story face to face over the past 30 years, our short film "Naturally Italian: The Story of Michael Angelo's" says it all.
There's a reason that our ingredients read like a grocery list, and not a trip to a chemistry lab. If you can't find it in our mom's kitchen, you won't find it in our meals. Our goal has always been to create dishes that taste like they were made in a home cook's kitchen. That can't be done if you add preservatives, fillers or chemicals. The only way to get that made-from-scratch taste is to cook it fresh, freeze it fast and send it straight to your grocer. Mom never compromised on quality or taste with the meals she served us, so we never compromise when it comes to the meals we serve you. It's not how other companies do it, but that's the way we've always done it, and it's the reason you can taste the difference in every bite of every Michael Angelo's meal.
Every recipe we use comes directly from our mom, Sara's kitchen. Her tried-and-true methods were learned over a lifetime of cooking and a love of feeding people. Sara cooked for her family side by side with her Sicilian grandmother, Foti. At our company, we carry on that same tradition today with two unique approaches: Small Batch Cooking and Made-To-Order delivery.
Our mom has a simple philosophy: fresh tastes better. Each day, we use only the finest ingredients to make Sara's famous dishes from scratch. Each meal we make is cooked in small batches because that's the best way to ensure the richest flavor. For example, other companies throw raw, diced onions into their meals. At Michael Angelo's we sauté our onions and garlic until perfectly caramelized and then add them to our dishes at the same stage you would if you were making them at home. It's the only way to get a richer tasting meal with unparalleled depth and flavor. It takes more time and effort to grind our own meat, grate our cheese and boil our pasta to a perfect al dente, but cooking as though we are putting each meal on your plate (and not in a box) is the only way to ensure the integrity of the dishes we love.
Most companies make their meals in bulk and then prepackage large orders of food to store in warehouses for weeks or even months at a time. At Michael Angelo's, we cook, package and ship our meals direct to your grocer. Its our "just in time" approach, and for small companies like ours, it's the perfect way to marry our small batch cooking methods with a delivery system that is designed to ensure freshness. By cutting out the middleman and shipping our meals directly to the grocer, we can guarantee freshness. On average, our meals are on your grocer's shelf within days. Other brands may be months old. It's just another way we protect our family dishes and our family name. And, since the freshest food really does taste better, we wouldn't have it any other way!
When your goal is Naturally Italian taste, it only makes sense to import authentic ingredients from Italy. We believe that the best cheese in the world is made by artisans who have spent a lifetime, even generations, perfecting their product. It's this kind of commitment to tradition that produces exceptional cheese. Our Parmesan and Romano cheeses are made by experts who know how to age it to the perfect texture and flavor, store it at the right temperature and protect it every step of the way from their door to ours. And our fresh Mozzarella and Ricotta cheeses are made with equal quality, care and craftsmanship. If you're really into cheese, check out our video about the Parmegiano Reggiano we use from a small, family-run farm near Bologna, Italy.
There are more than 7,500 different types of tomato, but only one that meets our mom's standards. We tried tomatoes from all over the world, but we only found one that delivered exactly what we wanted. And, of course, we only wanted the best - a tomato that had been vine-ripened naturally. We finally found a special area in northern California that could consistently deliver extraordinary Grade A tomatoes for Michael Angelo's. Only the reddest, ripest fruit goes into our family meals. Tomatoes that are ripened without any artificial means and left on the vine until their flavor peaks yield just the right balance of sweetness and acidity. Sara personally chose Grade A Roma tomatoes for our entrées because that's what she cooks with in her own kitchen. And, from harvest through canning and processing, we use the whole tomato and steam the skin from it naturally. The pectin produced by the tomato's skin is our thickener - not some additive. And you won't find food dyes, tomato paste or preservatives in our sauces because they weren't allowed in our house, and we're not going to send any of that stuff to your home, either.
Garlic is the cornerstone of many authentic Italian dishes. Sara required three things when she went looking for the perfect clove: authenticity, sweetness and aroma. So it only makes sense that we ended up using heirloom garlic grown from Italian seed. We were raised to believe the right ingredients make all the difference, and our garlic has the roots to prove it. Unlike American varieties, Italian garlic is very viscous; it actually feels slick and slippery inside. Its juice is what ensures that each clove caramelizes to perfection and produces a consistently mild, sweet flavor. We could save some money by using jarred or canned garlic, but that would't fly with Mom! And it wouldn't produce the signature taste that is at the heart of our famous Chicken Piccata, Lasagna and Eggplant Parmesan.
