You can't beat chips from the chippy as a treat once in a while. But everyone should have a bag of the frozen variety on standby at home.
And while it's easy enough to pick up a packet of a popular brand such as Aunty Bessie's or McCain's, each of the big supermarkets sell 'own brand' options of their own. But, since it's hard to get that much variety out of the taste of a chip, is there any difference between the brands? And if so, which supermarket can really claim the honour of selling the ultimate bag own brand frozen oven chips?.
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In a bid to find some sort of answer, I compared the chips from Asda, Aldi, Marks and Spencer and Tesco. In each store, I picked up their 'homestyle' options to give each supermarket an equal footing as I put them to the test. There was around a £1 difference between the cheapest and most expensive - but the difference didn't stop there.
Each of the batches was cooked at the appropriate temperature and specification on the packaging. And given chips are best paired with a good sauce, I tried each with brown sauce and ketchup. Here's how they fared when I compared on taste and value, starting with the cheapest.
Aldi - £1.49
Aldi offered the cheapest available option and with that came what tasted like the cheapest chip. What you get is a big bag of very basic looking chips, which even after a massively overextended cooking period still come out looking pale. It may actually be impossible to brown these chips — their outside layer looks no different to their inside layer and has the same texture too. In terms of taste they matched their complexion, offering a pale amount of taste that could have replicated by peeling a potato and leaving it in the oven for a short amount of time.
Score: 3/10
Tesco - £1.85
Tesco's chips turned out the crispiest by far, a rich golden brown colour. Of all four brands they certainly cooked the best, despite needing extra time, and it showed in the quality of the finished product. Despite finding a few semi-empty chips, the overall taste of this batch was solid, tasting the most like chips, and the least like and overly warm potato. The more solid nature though made them much better for sauce dipping, as I wasn't a risk of a structural collapse. Tesco certainly seemed to offer the best bang for your buck.
Score: 8/10
Asda - £2.45
Asda's chips cooked as well as Tesco, leaving them with that pleasing texture and colour when done. They also cooked the closest to their actual cooking time, saving on those pricy oven bills, though the trade-off was the leap up from the price of Tesco's chips.
While they did crisp well, they did not taste well, leaving a rather lacklustre aftertaste in the mouth, which had to be covered up with a healthy dollop of sauce. These chips are ideal for that purpose, but given how much extra they cost over Tesco, it's probably not worth your time.
Score: 6/10
M&S - £2.50
Sometimes price doesn't always make nice, and that is certainly the case here. It would be easy to expect M&S and their premium brands to be the easy winner for this list, but that couldn't be further from the truth. These chips can be described with one word: boring. Even after an extended visit to the oven, a nice golden brown hue on the outside, these chips were devoid of flavour, the only reason they are scraping a 2 is because they cooked better than Aldi chips. This is one premium brand I think is best avoided.
Score: 2/10
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