New research to help cash-strapped customers looking for cheaper ways to celebrate Christmas this year suggests Aldi is the supermarket to head to if you want to find the most affordable ingredients for a traditional festive dinner. Costing as little as £2.70 per head, Aldi’s Christmas dinner came out top in a ranking compiled by FCA-regulated credit broker, CashLady.com, which investigated the prices of crucial roast dinner components from eight of the UK’s leading supermarkets.
The items included in the study were a whole turkey, roast potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, red cabbage, gravy granules, stuffing, cranberry sauce and a Christmas pudding, all calculated to feed 8-10 guests. The full shop from Aldi is claimed to cost £24.43, while Asda came in a close second place at £25.84, followed by Tesco at £26.33.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's probably no surprise Waitrose was deemed the most expensive at £60.58 while Marks and Spenser was priced at £57.84. Sainsbury’s was on its own in the midfield as the third priciest at £48.15.
The methodology for the study says all the birds were classified as between 2-5kg by each retailer, while prices of vegetables were calculated based on a price per kilogram basis. However, it doesn’t specify exactly which brand, type or flavour of each item was used.
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In the name of detailed and rigorous analysis, I put this investigation to the test and headed out to Aldi to see how much it would really cost to make a Christmas dinner that guests might actually want to eat. As 8-10 people wouldn’t fit in my flat, let alone around my table, I settled for a roast to feed four hungry adults, none of whom, thankfully, had any specific dietary requirements.
At the Church Road Aldi branch in Bristol, I headed immediately to the poultry, where I encountered my first hurdle: no turkeys. Fresh turkeys are available in-store only from December 19 and can be ordered in advance up to December 15. When they are in stock, Aldi says an Ashfields British small Fresh Turkey weighing around 3.245kg will cost approximately £16.06 at £4.95 per kg.
In the freezer aisle, I found an Oakhurst Small British Ready Basted Whole Turkey weighing 2.8-4kg that would set me back £13.49 at £3.37 per kg, but requiring nearly 48 hours defrost, I decided to cut my losses and switch meats to gammon. With flavours like maple and bourbon and maple and marmalade, the pre-prepared joints tended toward the sticky and sweet, which, while they may be delicious, can leave a world of burnt-on sugar pain for whoever is washing up. So I opted instead for bougie-sounding truffle and porcini gammon priced at £9.99 and weighing 1.2 kg.
Meat issues resolved, I backtracked to veg, where I picked up a 1kg bag of 'mini roast potatoes' for 49p, reasoning that they would take less time to cook than the usual large Maris Pipers. A 500g bag of Nature's Pick Carrots was only 24p, while a red cabbage was 61p.
Sprouts proved challenging, and I ended up settling for two 200g bags of the ready-trimmed variety costing 95p each, making them not just the most expensive veg in the trolley but at £4.75 per kg, one of the pricier products on the list.
Store cupboard items were easy to find with a 130g box of sage and roasted onion and shallot stuffing mix costing £1.25, a 230g jar of specially selected cranberry sauce priced at £1.15 and 230g of Bisto turkey gravy granules costing £2.49. All that was left was the pudding.
I’ll be honest; I’m not a massive fan of Christmas pudding, and given the array of exotic flavours of pud that supermarkets come up with every year to tempt customers, I suspect I’m not alone. Aldi is no different, with options doused in all manner of drinks from the booze cupboard, including Marc de Champagne, Bucks fizz, and Pedro Ximinez, with prices starting at £4.29 for a standard 400g pudding. Thinking I’d saved a bit on the turkey and keen to buy a pudding my guests and I might actually want to eat, I chose a more premium Plum, Damson & Pink Gin model costing £8.99, and despite it not being on the list I wantonly threw in a tub of brandy cream costing £1.89.
The total came to £29, but given that having the oven going full blast for a couple of hours to prepare roast is not something I typically indulge in at the moment, I made an executive decision to add duck fat for the roast potatoes but as I couldn’t find it instore, swung by Lidl where a jar set me back £1.99.
Preparing the gammon with its prepackaged topping was a breeze, and it went into a fan-assisted electric oven for around 2 hours, followed by the spuds and stuffing. All in all, the oven was on for roughly 2.5 hours and employing an estimate from thisismoney.co.uk of 2.1 kWh of electricity used an hour at 71p an hour, the total cost of cooking was £1.78.
As I don’t have a microwave, the veg and pudding had to be cooked on the gas hob. According to thisismoney.co.uk, the average energy usage of a gas hob ring is sound 1.95 kW per hour or around 10p for 30 minutes, so a rough estimate means a total cost of 70p.
Other ingredients that I already had included herbs and spices, vinegar, cooking oil, a rasher of bacon for frying with the carrots and sprouts and an apple for braising with the cabbage. Based purely on the food shop and the energy usage, but not taking into account being an obliging host and putting on the central heating for my guests, the total cost comes in at £33.47 or £8.36 per person.
While it's hard to judge the quality of the meal rather than the quality of the cooking (full disclosure, I was not the head chef), the roast exceeded my expectations from a taste and quality perspective. However, I would say that even for a gammon, this one was on the salty side, requiring several pints of water to be consumed in the hours afterwards.
The roast had a festive feeling of abundance and contrast, providing everyone with generous portions and just a few token leftovers. The pudding, however, proved to be a folly.
Spending the extra for a snazzy-sounding flavour somehow seemed to achieve what I thought was impossible and make Christmas pudding taste even worse. Regrettably, most of it is still sitting forlornly in my fridge.
While the cost of my Aldi shop was greater than the amount found in CashLady.com’s research, having a more basic pudding and no cream would have kept the meal within budget. However, I would ditch it entirely and instead buy a cheaper dessert that people enjoy eating. Similarly, I wouldn’t bother wasting money on gravy granules when roasting the joint provided more than enough juice to make real gravy with some flour and water from the parboiled veg.
I remain sceptical at suggesting that 8-10 people could have been fed satisfactorily with the originally claimed £24.43 total unless most of them are children or people who strategically ate before arriving. However, I would undoubtedly consider choosing Aldi again if I wanted to host another festive feast without the pointless pudding this time.
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