Cheapo food ("value/basics" etc)

Depends what I'm making, if I want bland dried pasta I'll buy the cheapest **** on the shelf.
If I want a flavoursome egg based pasta I'll make it or if I'm in a hurry buy the best I can get.

Depends entirely on the dish, some sauces work better with a bland pasta, others you want a stronger taste. Like when people say pasta water needs to be salty as anything, not in all cases, most, but not all.
 
I generally find processed value stuff = poor quality
base ingedients (eg fruit, veg, eggs, etc) are all decent

Meats that I have had have been pretty decent (cubed beef), they normally go into a stew which probably helps.
 
My shopping basket is a mixed bag of high end and cheap brands.
Firstly, after seeing videos online about what goes into cheap meat and also living in a catered undergraduate hall (the very cheapest of ingredients) I very much dislike cheap meat.
Cheap veg is a different matter. A 'premium' carrot is one that is perfectly straight and looks nice. A 'value' one may have a kink in it, so the carrot may not be as nice to look at. Silly, but that is how it is done.
I often buy Tesco's value spuds and they are something like £2 for a 5KG bag. The odd potato needs some minor surgery performed on it with a sharp knife but taste wise - It is just a potato that might have a scuff on it.

As an engineer I am absolutely confident that big brand factories stop their production lines and change over the labels to make the exact same product but under the value name. I heard that Tesco value butter (the foil wrapped blocks) is the same as country life butter but I have have neither compared them or have any proof of this.
 
Just stop shopping at Tesco, It's not just the price, they have more on offer so naturally you'll buy more, shop at Iceland, get grade F 3KG bags of Chicken for £2!
 
I get stuff like tinned, tomatos, sweetcorn, tuna which is decent enough for me, get heinz soups and branston beans though, as they're usually a lot better. Frozen veg is usually fine, except we buy birdseye garden peas. Cheap biscuits are fine with me, won't buy regular cheap crisps though, used to buy walkers, but now mostly buy seabrook ones, but supermarkets own crisps are usually small portions, and have a tiny amount of flavouring in them.
 
For the most part I could/would buy cheap stuff, the only thing I won't sacrifice is Diet Coke, I have to have the proper Coca Cola branded stuff, that 17p homebrand "brown and water" stuff just doesn't taste good at all, neither does Pepsi lol
 
Justin said:
I do my shopping at Waitrose and find their 'essential' range to be very good quality throughout.
Click to expand...

I was about to put this - the Waitrose essentials range are very good quality, although the price isn't quite the same as Sainsbury's basics!

The main Sainsbury's basics product I buy is the milk chocolate digestive biscuits - I actually prefer them to the McVitie's version :o
 
I won't buy any value packaged products. I was once fed tesco value ice cream as a child. It tasted like it had sand in it and put me off value products for life.

I will buy value vegetables (peppers, courgettes, mushrooms, aubergines, onions etc) - you get to look at what is in the packet, usually just means that the veg is a little bit ugly. I wouldn't buy value tomatoes though as I only buy plum or cherry tomatoes and these are never in a value selection.

Happy to shop in Iceland as well. I think the whole shop is "value"! All frozen peas/ sweetcorn etc are much the same. Plus 4pints of milk is a £1, and you can't argue with that!
 
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