Sainsbury’s Liver and Bacon with Mash
UPDATE: eight years on, as of April 2020, this is still delicious and worthy of five stars. The packaging has had a tweak, but not much else has changed – including the RRP, which is only £2.
It’s a very rare thing to sit down to a microwave meal, close your eyes, and imagine you’re eating in a top class restaurant. Yes, this is a supermarket own brand, a microwave meal (of liver and mashed potato of all things!), but this is liver and bacon done very well indeed.
The mashed potato is creamy, but not sickeningly so. It has a fluffy, natural texture- not at all watery, and not too thick. It is generously complemented by a rich onion gravy, but doesn’t swim in it. The onions are cooked softly and though I prefer my onions a darker, golden brown, and more of them at that, this is a nice onion gravy.
Amazingly, the bacon seemed to brown in the microwave. This isn’t the best quality bacon, but it has a nice smokey taste. The real star of the show, however, is the liver.
Gorgeous, succulent and tender pieces of liver are cooked to perfection. Liver runs the risk of being dry, but this liver is infused with water and red wine and results in a satisfying texture with a hearty flavour (no pun intended). These are generous cuts of liver, several inches long.
The picture on the front of the box quite frankly doesn’t do this justice, coming across as an unidentifiable brown meat somewhere between steak and bacon. The reality is so much better than that, and it looks good even in the dingy office lighting in which I captured the second picture.
Overall, the portion size is reasonable though the whole meal feels like it could do with the addition of some vegetables. The proportion of liver and bacon, however, is very sizeable indeed- I was impressed. At the current £2.10, this proves very good value.
The microwave instructions are standard for the industry so there isn’t much to say about the preparation, but I have a couple of points; the plastic film comes off quite easily, which is good, but the 8 minutes total time required to cook it in a 800W microwave is a little on the long side.
Really though, this is an example to all other microwave foods. This is how you do it.