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.