Is this blog pivoting to budget supermarket food reviews? For today it is.

Unsure what to prepare for my evening meal, I decided to try one of Lidl’s ‘deluxe’ prepared meals. This one purports to be a delicious nut roast, mixing vegetables and vegan cheese. I’ll try anything once, so bought it and gave it a go. The result was pretty bad in places that should have been obvious to the manufacturers.

Inside each pack there are two roasts to be cooked from frozen. As far as I can tell, they are compressed cakes of nuts and vegetables, held together with starches and jelly. A decent format. Yet, upon opening the package I am presented with a glaringly obvious mistake: It’s served in plastic tubs! Why‽ Considering everything from microplastics to general waste reduction issues we’re supposed to be reducing plastic. Lidl already sells most of it’s other prepared foods either in more easily recyclable metal containers or just straight from cardboard. But worse still: The preparation and handling of the box has led to the cheap thin plastic shattering in the package. This results in shards of plastic littering the box and the food itself.

Not being one to waste food, I popped it out of the container, picked out the plastic with a knife, and discarded several sections of the cake altogether, then set about cooking it. It uses a fan oven and the instructions (55 minutes) are spot on accurate. I’ve seen many oven foods get the prep time totally wrong, so for once it’s nice for the meal to be ready on time. The final result doesn’t look terrible, if a bit less golden and more brown than the photoshopped mockup on the packaging. The ‘cheese’ leaking out is a bit worrisome.

Now for the most important part: The taste. It’s nice. ish. Given the prep issues and past history with some of these vegan ‘meal ideas’ I’ve had from Lidl and other shops I was not expecting it to actually be edible. But, it’s pretty much what the pack says. Nuts, legumes, and vegetables mixed together. Pretty good. Except they’ve added vegan ‘cheese’ which just ruins the whole thing. For all the various attempts to create alternatives, replacements, or introducing whole new foods to market, the big area that in my view hasn’t succeeded is non-animal-based cheese. Either give me real cheese or forget it altogether. These roasts would have tasted perfect on their own without the tasteless white glue in the middle. This is a food review, so I need to use pretentious words like mouthfeel: The nuts and the chickpeas are nice and crunchy, but it’s easy to dig into. It’s a bit dry, which I guess is why they added the ‘cheese’. The taste is mildly sweet, but not so sugary that it feels like a dessert, it is exactly what I would want from a vegetable main.

The whole thing is a neat idea, but kind of a disappointment in it’s execution. It does give me a good idea for a recipe to make for myself though. Combine some veg, nuts, and fruit jelly into a cake, bake it, and then serve. as a veggie loaf. And then I can pick the sauce myself, maybe a real cheese sauce, or something more like a gravy.

1/10, Lidl, Good idea, but failed in pretty much every way possible. Don’t buy, and if you did, see if you can find the receipt.