Pret A Manger Posh Cheddar & Pickle Baguette

After stumbling upon yet another Pret A Manger outlet, I decided it was time to sample the baguette that was ranked Pret's best 'sandwich' by no less an organ than Time Out magazine. Could the Posh Cheddar & Pickle baguette possibly live up to this grand bestowal? Let's find out...


First Impressions

It doesn't look overly inspiring as it sits in it's plastic wrapper.  Some cress and sun-dried tomato peer out invitingly, but overall it doesn't look like there is too much to get excited about. Maybe a closer look inside will get me a bit more excited.

Detailed Inspection

Upon opening the baguette it looks as if this has been made in a hurry, or by someone right handed, as most of the filling is stacked towards the right hand side.

The two slices of cheese stretch across the whole baguette, but the red onion (what there is of it) is almost all up one end. The mayo is sparingly applied to the baguette, but the 3 bits of sun-dried tomato are slightly more evenly applied. So it comes as no surprise that there is virtually a whole mouthful of baguette at one end that only has Cheese and none of the other fillings. I didn't lift up the cheese to see how the pickle was spread for fear of yet more disappointment!


Taste

This is a very tasty baguette - when you happen to get a mouthful of all the ingredients that is. Due to the uneven spreading of the ingredients you can get either a lovely mouthful of tangy pickle and sun-dried tomato or just plain old cheese. The baguette itself is also very tasty - they used to advertise this as an 'artisan' baguette, but don't anymore. It still tastes the same but has a less pretentious ring to it. But it's certainly tastier than a plain old white baguette.


Verdict

This is a good baguette alright, but spoiled somewhat by the clumsy assembling of the fillings. If the fillings were evenly spread out (hopefully the law of averages would determine you would get one of these at some point) then you can see why Time Out would like it so much. Maybe I was a bit unlucky on the day and the many other Pret branches make a better job of putting this one together.

So based purely on taste I will give it 4/5 - however they need to up their baguette assembly procedures somewhat.

Pret A Manger Classic Super Club sandwich

There is an infamous urban myth that says you are never more than 20 feet from a Rat in the United Kingdom. The same can almost be said of a Pret sandwich, as the Pret A Manger chain of sandwich shops in the City of London appear on almost every other street. Indeed, there are 5 Pret outlets within 0.3 miles of my workplace, according to Google Maps! They are probably the most popular chain in the city, with the Pret Sandwich or some other comestible bearing the Pret logo being a very common site on office desks.

So I picked the nearest branch and off I went to sample the Pret Classic Super Club sandwich.


First Impressions

Pret sandwiches are packed in a uniform, utilitarian style box, with no labelling to differentiate between them, so they're as plain as you can get. The corporate identity is paramount.

On the sandwich front, the filling appears to be almost bursting out of the front of the sandwich, promising a feast of Chicken, Bacon & Tomato, with copious amounts of salad leaves. Lets take a closer look.


Detailed Inspection

When opening the sandwich, it's plain to see that a lot of the filling is salad leaves. So much so, that at first you can't see the rest of the ingredients. However, after sweeping the leaves into the bin (more on that in a minute), the rest of the filling becomes clear.

The filling with with salad leaves removed

There are a couple of sizeable slices of Tomato, however the chicken and bacon appear a bit thin on the ground bread. There appears to be a fair amount of bread with no chicken or bacon covering it. As is so often the case, the top slice of bread has no butter or mayo applied.


Taste

This is actually quite a good tasting sandwich. The mix of chicken & mayonnaise seems about right, with the bacon adding a slight smoked flavour. The bacon could benefit from being a bit crispier, having a slight rubbery quality to it., however that's tricky to achieve with cold bacon. The Tomato adds the right amount of moistness/freshness into the mix.

The bread seems fresher than some of the other sandwiches reviewed so far, (perhaps benefiting from the Pret policy of making the sandwiches in store every day) so has a softer texture than other efforts.


Verdict

This is probably the best sandwich I have reviewed so far, with regards to quality of ingredients and taste. However, that should be expected considering the price premium over bog standard Tesco efforts. But at the price level it's sold for, they could make a bit more effort to ensure the chicken/mayo mix covers more of the bread. But other than that there is a lot to like.

Oh, and if you're wondering why I emptied the salad leaves into the bin, I can't eat them or any other 'raw' leaves (rocket, spinach etc.). So it is more than annoying going into Pret and finding virtually all of their sandwiches filled with either salad leaves, rocket or spinach!

But that annoyance aside, I give this 4/5.

Marks & Spencer Wild Salmon & Cucumber sandwich

A short wander up the lunch time road led me to the revered Marks and Spencer food halls of Gracechurch Street, where from their surprisingly small selection I selected the 'Wild Salmon & Cucumber' sandwich.

Was it worth the extra few hundred yards walk?

First Impressions

The packaging is a few steps up the design scale when compared to the drab plain beige that Tesco pack their (so far) underwhelming sandwiches in. Indeed, the packaging promises a feast of cucumber inside! Could there really be so much cucumber inside or are they just promising us cucumber nirvana?

The cucumber isn't so obvious when looking at the front of the sandwich, but there seems to be a decent amount of salmon filling on show.



Detailed Inspection

When opening the sandwich, we can see that M&S have made more of an effort with the cucumber than Tesco - there is at least two and a half slices of cucumber in each half of the sandwich! They have also made a good effort at spreading the Salmon filling to the outer reaches of the bread.

However, on the plain piece of bread there is a rather off putting thin white coating, which at first glance I thought was mould. But it is in fact a very thin spreading of butter. It's so thin that I don't know how they could have got it on there - it's like there was some butter on a piece of paper that they have then pressed against the bread, and a small amount has transferred from the paper to the bread. And I've never seen butter so white - I thought it was margarine, but it is listed as butter in the ingredients. So the half with the filling looks promising, but not so much the other.

Taste

Salmon, unless it is smoked, has quite a subtle taste. And here that subtlety is almost lost by being mixed with mayonnaise. Due to the amount of cucumber in the sandwich you get some crunch with almost every bite. The wholemeal bread is fairly soft, and is thankfully free of the bitty bits that you so often get in wholemeal bread.

It's probably best described as being in-offensive. It's not bad, but a lot of the Salmon flavour is lost.

Verdict

For £1.90 it's quite a good value sandwich. I don't think it will ever win any awards (maybe I should come up with some), but I think it's better than the Tesco sandwiches that I have reviewed so far. Marks and Spencer have at least made an effort to get a good amount of filling all the way through the sandwich, so that is worth an extra mark at least. I just think it could have done with a bit less mayo or something else to bring the Salmon flavour out a bit more.

I am going to give it a generous 4/5, mainly because I haven't got a half sandwich graphic.

Tesco Tuna & Cucumber Sandwich

Where would the world be without the good old Tuna Sandwich? Walk into any sandwich shop or supermarket and you'll most likely find some kind of variant of the Tuna sandwich. Usual accompaniments include sweetcorn, tomato or cucumber. So how does the Tesco variant fare?

The Tesco example is one of their cheaper sandwiches at £1.60, and comes with cucumber. Is it a bargain? Let's see...

First impressions

As we open the sandwich box, we can see that the Tuna is visible, so there must be a half decent amount of Tuna in the sandwich. And there are at least a few bits of cucumber. So at first glance it doesn't look too bad for £1.60.

Tesco Tuna & Cucumber sandwich

Detailed Inspection

But what is this? Upon opening the sandwich we see how little our £1.60 is getting us:

Miserably small slices of cucumber

In one half of the sandwich the cucumber doesn't even amount to 2 slices, and the partial slices are arranged right at the front to give the impression that the sandwich contains a decent amount of cucumber. Although not clear from the photo, the amount of Tuna gets thinner towards the back and the top slice of bread has nothing on it at all - no butter or mayo. Just a plain piece of bread.

Having seen the first half of the sandwich you could reasonably expect the rest of the partial cucumber slices to be in the second half of the sandwich - the top slice is missing about half a slice, and bottom slice about three quarters of a slice. But no! The partial cucumber slices in the other half do not make up a whole slice! 

Where have the missing parts of the cucumber slices gone?

Somewhere there is a big pile of cucumber offcuts. Maybe they use them for even smaller portions in other sandwiches. Maybe the factory workers bring a little fun into their daily routines by competing for the 'biggest pile of cucumber offcuts' award. Who knows? One thing's for sure - they are not in the sandwich.

Taste

When finally getting round to eating the sandwich, it's not a totally unpleasant experience. The flavour of the Tuna is OK, mixed as it is with mayo, but it is let down by the filling being far too thin. The cucumber (what there is of it) is crunchy.

But because the filling is too thin, the bread is what you can taste the most of. This would be fine if it was a well made, tasty bread, but a low cost brown sliced loaf will never have the best taste.

It's rather like eating a single slice of bread that has had something spread on it rather than a sandwich.

Cost

So if I was to try and put this sandwich together myself, how much would it cost? Going by the prices on the Tesco website for their online shopping, I've come up with the following:

• 2 slices of bread - 4.5p based on Tesco Stay Fresh Wholemeal Medium Bread @ 50p.
• Tuna - 18p based on one third of Tesco Everyday Value Tuna Chunks @ 55p.
• Cucumber - 2p based on Tesco Whole Cucumber @ 42p
• Mayo - 2p Tesco Everyday Value Mayonnaise @ 40p

I've been generous and assumed they used a third of a tin of Tuna and that you could get 40 slices or so from a whole cucumber. So the grand total comes to 26.5p! And that is using shop prices, not the cost price that a mass producer would receive. I have no idea what their cost is in producing the sandwich, it's packaging and transportation, but it's fair to say based on the ingredients you are not getting great value.

Verdict

The cost of £1.60 seems cheap for a lunchtime sandwich, but it's clear it's not particularly great value - the taste is OK, but some more filling would make it so much more enjoyable. For the cost of £1.60 you could make a far superior version. In fact, I'm struggling to see how you could spend that much - even if you used 2 whole tins of Tuna for an extra thick filling you would still come out way under budget!

I give it 2/5.

 

Tesco Chicken Salad with Bacon Sandwich

Bacon is a magical ingredient - add it to a burger and it can transform something ordinary to great heights. So I'm always tempted by a sandwich that includes bacon!

Does adding bacon to this chicken salad combination make it an irresistible delight? Lets see...

First Impressions

I decided to leave the sandwich in the box when taking the photo, as it looked as if the filling was on the verge of falling out of the bread.

Plenty of filling on show

At first glance this looks quite promising. As it's a No Mayo sandwich my only worry is that it might be a bit dry.

Detailed Inspection

After taking the sandwich out of the box and opening it, we find that there is a fairly decent amount of filling, although it's clear they are bulking it out with the salad leaves. But there is still a decent amount of chicken and bacon.

They have also made a fairly good attempt and spreading the ingredients across the depth of the bread.

Taste

The big problem with this sandwich is the lack of mayo - despite the presence of a slice or two of tomato, the overriding impression is of dryness. Both chicken and bacon are quite dry when cooked and used on their own, and especially when used cold, and this is reflected here. Plus the use of brown bread, which is itself inherently dry, adds to this impression.

The flavour of the chicken and bacon is fine, if unspectacular, but I couldn't detect any seasoning. Also the flavours don't seem to blend together either. The salad leaves add a little crunch, but don't add to the flavour.

Verdict

The use of Mayo in sandwiches is always debatable, as overdone it can render most sandwiches tasting very similar, but in this case it would have helped not only overcome the dryness, but also blend the flavours together a little more.

It's not a bad deal at £2.20, as chicken and bacon are two of the more expensive ingredients to buy, and combined with the £3 offer Tesco do to include crisps and a drink then overall it's quite good value. Just keep that drink handy when you're eating it.

I give it 3/5.