Evil: Their chilli sauce in a jar, stupidly hot and I really enjoyed it at the time, but gave me the scariest/hottest poo ever known to mankind the day after
Just been reading through this and thanks for cheering me up after a bad day!!!
After my good experience of Lidl's answer to Bounty bars, today I tried their Twix and Mars bootleg bars.
Neither was bad, but not as impressive as the Bounty.
The Mars was just too sweet, especially the dark nougat layer at the bottom, which was also a bit thin in my opinion. The texture of the caramel was too thin and slightly gritty, and tasted a bit artificial like the cheap caramel sweets you used to get in Woolworth's Pix & Mix.
It was the same caramel on the Twix, which meant it wasn't as nice as I was hoping. Also, because it's not as thick and chewy as the caramel you get on a real Twix, you can't do that thing of peeling off chunks of it with your teeth and chewing it. The biscuit was OK, but not as good as an old Twix.
The last time I tasted a real Twix it was awful. They had changed the flavour of the biscuit, and the caramel was too sweet. I don't think the last Mars I ate was as good as they used to be either, again too sweet.
With Christmas approaching, Lidl have just brought back their usual range of ginger biscuits and other seasonal sweet stuff. I like the plain ginger biscuits but this time tried the iced ones. They're not overly sweet, considering they're covered in icing. But they're not special enough to bother with again.
They've also started stocking their 'Delux' range of frozen pies again, which were lovely when I tried them last year. Much better than other supermarket own-brand pies.
I've also bought their bread flour and a marzipan sponge cake, which I'll try later. The flour's about a third of the price of Allinson's 'very strong' bread flour and has less gluten (but still more than Asda's own brand 'Strong' flour), so I'll be interested to see how it compares.
I've stopped buying onions in Lidl. No matter which ones you get, they're always tougher than other supermarkets'. Even if you use them in sauces that simmer for hours, they're still like slivers of unchewable plastic rather then melting into the sauce. They can take the shine off an otherwise nice salad too.
Lidl bread flour - OK but a rather bland taste. It's cheap, but I'd rather spend the extra for Allinsons Extra Strong flour. That said, the bread it makes tastes closer to supermarket bread than Allinsons, so I might try mixing them next time to get the best of both worlds.
Chicken goujons - £1.79 for a tub of unfrozen pieces. As with all the other processed chicken products in Lidl (usually frozen), it's reformed chicken and tastes too much of fat and gristle rather than meat. They weren't unpleasant, just unsatisfying, and I won't be buying them again. For home made junk food like this, I much prefer Asda's breaded chicken fillets, which look the same but are proper pieces of chicken and therefore have a better taste. The only reason I tried them was because they weren't frozen, so I thought they may be different.
Gingerbread - They only appear around Christmas. I like their simple shortbread ginger biscuits but this year tried the larger ones with icing (Lebkuchen Selection). Although they weren't horribly sweet, I just didn't like them and will probably throw most of the bag out. I then tried the chocolate covered gingerbread biscuits, but the gingerbread inside is a bit gooey when you chew it and I'm not keen on them. If you like Soreen, you'll like these. But I don't.
Showergel and deodorant - Excellent value for money. The 'Ice Attack' shower gel smells of eucalyptus oil or something, and can slightly tingle on your skin. Great value for 59p. Their 'Energy' deodorant smells nice, though quite generic. Definitely worth 85p compared to Lynx and Sure etc.
Pies - I see the 'Delux' brand of frozen pies is back. I tried them all last year and they were surprisingly nice. Better than bigger supermarket own brands.
Chicken breast/pieces- is fine at least as good as standard Tesco/Asda stuff - wish they would bring back the bags of frozen breast on the bone though.
Free Range Whole Chicken is fine
Pork is great
Steak mince is lovely
Fresh burgers are fatty for me, budget/normal mince is good quality and so is the really cheap beef/pork mince they started selling late last year.
Pasta and curry sauces are all good
egg pasta is great
Trophy Basmati rice is excellent
Milk Excellent
Fresh Bread all excellent (shame they don't do rye bread anymore)
Shame they dropped the probiotic vanilla yogurt in 4's - that was a top quality product at £1 for 4 large individual pots
Ham/salami all great
Chips are fine (fry in oil)
Cod steaks frozen are great
Cod fillet in batter is great (Blue box)
Crumbles are excellent value and delicious
Most of the ice cream is excellent
Chocolate chilled puddings - lovely
The Formil washing powder is good. £6.45 for a 60 wash box. As good as branded powders. The fresh chicken thighs are good also as is the Cien shower gel. I don't really buy any thing else in there.
Lidl in Spain are good as they stock quite alot of German foods as well as Spanish so we get a good choice of foods, especially cheese and cold meats.
Most of the wines they stock are better than the ones in UK (and a hell of a lot cheaper).
Good veg and their bread mixes for machines are great tasting.
Eggs are awful - always old and spread over the pan even when we buy them the day they stock the shelves and they don't sell baked beans and chopped tomatoes!!!
For all the people who miss the cherry jaffa cakes Lidl used to do, Morrisons now stock them under their Polish food section, though they're expensive.
They're in a blue tray packet, and called Delicje. You get 147g for 99p. Nicer than McVities, and I think I saw other flavours.
They have a fantastic resealable top - miles ahead of the wrappers we have in the UK. You often see this in European packaging, including cleverly designed chocolate wrappers. UK wrappers still have to be clawed and bitten open, including those supposed easy-open red strips at the end of biscuit and crackers wrappers that never work!
I also tried their new SOS hand cream, which seems to be a copy of big-brand Norwegian formula creams. It's fantastic, and costs £1.25 for 75ml, half of what you get with their other hand creams. It's very thick and not easy to spread, so I tend to add a couple of drops of water when I use it. In this weather, it works better than their almond oil hand cream, and smells a lot nicer than their beeswax one.
Delux chocolate pudding - the 99p Chocolate Bombe, with or without Caramel is really nice.
Also the Delux stem ginger biscuits are good too, and has nice chunks of ginger in them too.
I tried a 500ml tub of desert that was nice. I forget the name but it's in a yellow tub and looks like yoghurt but made mainly of cream and available in vanilla or chocolate. The vanilla reminded me of the artificial 'cream' topping on Birds trifles back in the 70s that you mixed from powder. Probably not something to eat all the time, but a nice treat. I already like those 1KG tubs of yoghurt they sell, especially the stracciatella.
Also, they seem to have silently changed the naan bread. It now tastes like normal bread rather than naan, and isn't very nice so I've switched to Asda's own brand naans.
Oh, and they have recently been stocking packets of old fashioned sweets, but they weren't very nice. I tried coconut mushrooms and shrimps & bananas, which used to taste lovely when I was a kid. But these are nothing more than coloured bits of fluffy icing sugar, so I won't be trying any others.
Their normal wine gums are nice, though their "American Hard Gums" are only slightly harder, covered in sugar and don't have much flavour. After an initial slight taste of fruit and sugar, you quickly feel like you're chewing a lump of unflavoured and unsweetened gelatin.
I miss the old packets of Rowntrees winegums that were hard enough to deflect bullets.
Disappointed that Lidl have stopped selling their recycled toilet paper which was thick and cheap, they now sell a different budget version which is thin and rubbish.
I buy their fresh cheese and tomato small pizzas for 49p and put my own toppings on.
Their frozen stone baked spinach and also the vegetarian pizzas are 2 for £2.
Can't say I've really ever had any decent meat frozen pizzas anywhere so again best to use your own toppings.
The mozzarella pizzas are also delightfully mozzarellary
I like the fact that it provides a bit of an alternative to the big supermarkets which seem all but one of the same. Little at times tends to be a little quirky, I like that.
Comments
Just been reading through this and thanks for cheering me up after a bad day!!!
biscuits
yogurts
bread ..ours has Hovis ..brilliant
fresh meat
I cud go on
Bad
frozen chicken products like Kievs etc
Their fresh chicken kievs are lovely. We've just had them for tea with salad and new potatoes.
Neither was bad, but not as impressive as the Bounty.
The Mars was just too sweet, especially the dark nougat layer at the bottom, which was also a bit thin in my opinion. The texture of the caramel was too thin and slightly gritty, and tasted a bit artificial like the cheap caramel sweets you used to get in Woolworth's Pix & Mix.
It was the same caramel on the Twix, which meant it wasn't as nice as I was hoping. Also, because it's not as thick and chewy as the caramel you get on a real Twix, you can't do that thing of peeling off chunks of it with your teeth and chewing it. The biscuit was OK, but not as good as an old Twix.
The last time I tasted a real Twix it was awful. They had changed the flavour of the biscuit, and the caramel was too sweet. I don't think the last Mars I ate was as good as they used to be either, again too sweet.
With Christmas approaching, Lidl have just brought back their usual range of ginger biscuits and other seasonal sweet stuff. I like the plain ginger biscuits but this time tried the iced ones. They're not overly sweet, considering they're covered in icing. But they're not special enough to bother with again.
They've also started stocking their 'Delux' range of frozen pies again, which were lovely when I tried them last year. Much better than other supermarket own-brand pies.
I've also bought their bread flour and a marzipan sponge cake, which I'll try later. The flour's about a third of the price of Allinson's 'very strong' bread flour and has less gluten (but still more than Asda's own brand 'Strong' flour), so I'll be interested to see how it compares.
I've stopped buying onions in Lidl. No matter which ones you get, they're always tougher than other supermarkets'. Even if you use them in sauces that simmer for hours, they're still like slivers of unchewable plastic rather then melting into the sauce. They can take the shine off an otherwise nice salad too.
Chicken goujons - £1.79 for a tub of unfrozen pieces. As with all the other processed chicken products in Lidl (usually frozen), it's reformed chicken and tastes too much of fat and gristle rather than meat. They weren't unpleasant, just unsatisfying, and I won't be buying them again. For home made junk food like this, I much prefer Asda's breaded chicken fillets, which look the same but are proper pieces of chicken and therefore have a better taste. The only reason I tried them was because they weren't frozen, so I thought they may be different.
Gingerbread - They only appear around Christmas. I like their simple shortbread ginger biscuits but this year tried the larger ones with icing (Lebkuchen Selection). Although they weren't horribly sweet, I just didn't like them and will probably throw most of the bag out. I then tried the chocolate covered gingerbread biscuits, but the gingerbread inside is a bit gooey when you chew it and I'm not keen on them. If you like Soreen, you'll like these. But I don't.
Showergel and deodorant - Excellent value for money. The 'Ice Attack' shower gel smells of eucalyptus oil or something, and can slightly tingle on your skin. Great value for 59p. Their 'Energy' deodorant smells nice, though quite generic. Definitely worth 85p compared to Lynx and Sure etc.
Pies - I see the 'Delux' brand of frozen pies is back. I tried them all last year and they were surprisingly nice. Better than bigger supermarket own brands.
Beef joints are excellent - tender tasty meat
Chicken breast/pieces- is fine at least as good as standard Tesco/Asda stuff - wish they would bring back the bags of frozen breast on the bone though.
Free Range Whole Chicken is fine
Pork is great
Steak mince is lovely
Fresh burgers are fatty for me, budget/normal mince is good quality and so is the really cheap beef/pork mince they started selling late last year.
Pasta and curry sauces are all good
egg pasta is great
Trophy Basmati rice is excellent
Milk Excellent
Fresh Bread all excellent (shame they don't do rye bread anymore)
Shame they dropped the probiotic vanilla yogurt in 4's - that was a top quality product at £1 for 4 large individual pots
Ham/salami all great
Chips are fine (fry in oil)
Cod steaks frozen are great
Cod fillet in batter is great (Blue box)
Crumbles are excellent value and delicious
Most of the ice cream is excellent
Chocolate chilled puddings - lovely
Formil washing powder/liquid etc excellent
Muesili/sultana bran etc all great
free range eggs .. £1 excellent
I'm a Lidl fan
Most of the wines they stock are better than the ones in UK (and a hell of a lot cheaper).
Good veg and their bread mixes for machines are great tasting.
Eggs are awful - always old and spread over the pan even when we buy them the day they stock the shelves and they don't sell baked beans and chopped tomatoes!!!
Bad - Most of the ready meals.
They're in a blue tray packet, and called Delicje. You get 147g for 99p. Nicer than McVities, and I think I saw other flavours.
They have a fantastic resealable top - miles ahead of the wrappers we have in the UK. You often see this in European packaging, including cleverly designed chocolate wrappers. UK wrappers still have to be clawed and bitten open, including those supposed easy-open red strips at the end of biscuit and crackers wrappers that never work!
I also tried their new SOS hand cream, which seems to be a copy of big-brand Norwegian formula creams. It's fantastic, and costs £1.25 for 75ml, half of what you get with their other hand creams. It's very thick and not easy to spread, so I tend to add a couple of drops of water when I use it. In this weather, it works better than their almond oil hand cream, and smells a lot nicer than their beeswax one.
Also the Delux stem ginger biscuits are good too, and has nice chunks of ginger in them too.
Also, they seem to have silently changed the naan bread. It now tastes like normal bread rather than naan, and isn't very nice so I've switched to Asda's own brand naans.
Oh, and they have recently been stocking packets of old fashioned sweets, but they weren't very nice. I tried coconut mushrooms and shrimps & bananas, which used to taste lovely when I was a kid. But these are nothing more than coloured bits of fluffy icing sugar, so I won't be trying any others.
Their normal wine gums are nice, though their "American Hard Gums" are only slightly harder, covered in sugar and don't have much flavour. After an initial slight taste of fruit and sugar, you quickly feel like you're chewing a lump of unflavoured and unsweetened gelatin.
I miss the old packets of Rowntrees winegums that were hard enough to deflect bullets.
Can't say I've really ever had any decent meat frozen pizzas anywhere so again best to use your own toppings.
The mozzarella pizzas are also delightfully mozzarellary
No Bakery or baskets in mine - Hayle, Cornwall