Egg Chips and Beans in a butty...
Having recently given a resounding thumbs down to ALDI baked beans ( at 26p)
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Tonight
I put Lidl's Baked Beans to the test at 22p ( Might have gone up since)
The meal was a cornucopia of substitute produce. Some comparison of Asda products.
Chips, Egg and beans with Bread and Flora spread.
Chips were from Lidl Oakland "British White Potatoes" 7.5kg bag . Sorry Unsure of the price, but less than £3 and quite cheap.
Baked Beans
Lidl 'Simply' Baked beans in tomato sauce. 22p
Bread Lidl 'Simply' medium white sliced 80p, if I recall correctly? with Flora spread.
Eggs Asda Essentials cage eggs £1.50 for 15 Fried in Flora sunflower oil, as were the chips.
Eggs first..... They were just like much dearer eggs. Apparently Farmfoods do a cheaper egg, but I have to get through these first.
Bread. This was acceptably like our usual, dearer, Roberts bread, but considerably cheaper. A little dry to the touch. This contains soya, for some reason. It tasted ok in a chip butty, but was noticeably a bit inferior. Not as moist. A passing mention for
ASDA's Own brand bread 90p which we have tried recently: That's generally a pretty good cheap bread, but it falls apart when buttered in a most annoying way.
Chips/ potatoes. The spuds were smaller than fist size, so not ideal for chips. Skins were a bit warty/scabby but that was superficial and peeled off thinly. A few small internal brown bits, but nothing major. These were on a par with morrisons 'Wonky' spuds. The chips were double fried in used oil, just as I would with better 'Maris piper' spuds.
Though the chips were perfectly acceptable, it was quite noticeable that they did not colour up evenly. Hard to explain but while some were golden brown, some were still pale.
The Beans (22p).... Oh, the beans: Key comparison ingredient.
Subjective comparison with ALDI's at 26p, and Branston at 63p
Sauce quantity: Much better than Aldi's, which were drowned in the stuff.
Sauce quality: Quite rich and 'tomatoey'. Good sweetness. Could maybe have carried a bit more salt. Not too runny, but not as sticky as Branston's. An unusual but not unpleasant hint of onion powder. The onion repeated considerably into the evening.
The beans themselves. Perfectly normal size and texture of haricot, but here was the surprise.... The beans themselves had a hint of bitterness. This was noticed by myself and MrJ and he found it unacceptable. Some beans got left by MrJ "I hope you didn't buy a lot of these". The elder member of the tasting panel wolfed everything down, quite happily.
Incidentally, we used Batt's ketchup from LIDL which is a great substitute.
Conclusions:
The LIDL baked beans are less than 1/3 of the price of the Branston Benchmark and probably 75% of the quality and the Lidl beans were far superior to the similar ALDI offering. Since baked beans in sauce are usually eaten as is, I'm inclined, to shop around for a slightly better offering. Good enough for me, but not to Mr J's liking. The Lidl beans could possibly meld well in a chilli or a bean casserole. I'm not ruling them out, yet.
The LIDL bread, at 2/3 the price of the benchmark Roberts bread was about 2/3 the quality. Not generally good enough to be a substitute.
The LIDL spuds. I can't recall the exact price, but certainly acceptable boiled. Not great for jacket potatoes, because of the blemished skin. Not a great substitute for chips. I think I'll just use these for boiling.
The ASDA eggs. Great value, if not a bit cruel. These will be a regular substitute unless we find cheaper at Farmfoods
He's a bit 'survivalist' and he can talk for England.
