Christmas is the time of year when supermarkets like to launch Alice in Wonderland-style versions of ordinary foodstuffs, and shelves are stacked with supersized and super-small foods to delight your party guests. Several shops are offering sausage rolls for your Christmas buffet centrepiece - either as larger-than-life jumbo limited editions or enormous circular sausage wreaths.
At Waitrose, a ginormous pork, winter vegetable and pancetta roll that serves 10 is available for pre-order to pick-up in store from December 20. Priced at £13, it contains British outdoor bred pork, root vegetables and smoky pancetta, wrapped in puff pastry made with lactic butter, with a hot water crust pastry lattice.
Meanwhile, M&S have a handcrafted Christmas sausage roll garland for £9 filled with British outdoor-bred pork, sage and caramelised onions and topped with poppy seeds. It’s also a pre-order item but is currently listed as sold out on the store’s site.
Read More: I tried the famous Yorkshire pudding wrap at Bristol's Christmas Market
If you want to make an impact with your buffet but not with your wallet, rival budget supermarkets Aldi and Lidl both offer versions of these premium products at less than half the price of the higher-end chains, which we decided to put to the test. Available in the freezer section, Aldi’s Specially Selected Sweet & Tart Extra Large Cranberry Sausage Roll weighs 700g and serves ten.
New for 2022, this beast of a snack features a slab of pork with a central channel port and cranberry chutney, all encased in puff pastry for just £3.99. Meanwhile Lidl’s Deluxe Showstopper Garland is a pound more expensive for a ring of British pork sausage meat with dried sweetened cranberries and sage, wrapped in puff pastry with a parsley-flavoured breadcrumb sprinkle.
It weighs 550g and splits into roughly ten sections for easy sharing. To put that size in context, a Greggs sausage roll weighs just over 100g.
Here's how they compared in our head-to-head taste test:
Unboxing and baking
Unboxing the Aldi XL roll, it's sizeable, though not as long as the picture on the packaging makes it appear. An issue is immediately apparent - the filling is not centrally positioned within the pastry, and as it’s frozen, it cannot be coaxed over. The Lidl garland is similarly slightly smaller than expected has a rustic shape. Still, judging a sausage roll by its frozen appearance is impossible, so I reserved judgement for 45 minutes at 190 degrees celsius.
Slicing and tasting
It would be fair to say that fully baked, neither roll lives up to its publicity images. The pastry casing of the Aldi XL roll resembles an overstuffed envelope which bulges and buckles under the strain of its filling, some of which leaks out one side. The festive pastry star topper is also sadly split under the roll's distended girth.
Slicing into the thin end confirms my suspicions that the filling is not well distributed, but a cross-section from the centre reveals a huge portion of pork with sauce oozing out of the middle, as promised. Unlike the rich red berry filling on the box, it’s more of an orange colour and has very little cranberry favour, and instead tastes like a sweet and zingy chutney.
The issue with going so big with the pork means that in each bite, the meat-to-pastry ratio is way off, while the latter proves too flimsy and wet to hold its shape, sliding off the slices. Despite this, the flavour of the pork is pleasant and well-seasoned and best served cold; the combination of fillings works better than it does warm.
The Lidl garland bakes more evenly in the oven, producing a consistent golden brown flaky pastry that is crisp on the surface with plenty of layers underneath. Every segment, except for the one on which the pasty star is hanging off, has the same amount of tasty filling, coarsely ground for a more chewy texture, with herbaceous notes but lacking something of its claimed cranberry credentials.
Sliced up, each morsel is an enjoyable bite but does lose something of its festive impact as it more closely resembles a run-of-the-mill sausage roll bite.
Verdict
In this head-to-head, the Lidl garland is the clear winner taking what is a delicious sausage roll and making it almost circular for maximum Christmas appeal and also comes in a vegan option to boot. Aldi’s giant sausage roll isn’t a total bust but needs more work on its ratios as well as a bit more buffet table appeal.
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