Good and Bad Buys at Lidl and Aldi stores (***Please don't expire***)

Saver73

My Aldi favourites are the (frozen) lemon sole fillets with garlic coating, the lemon and parsley fillets are nice too, I buy the chocolate chip cookies (red packet) every week, they seem to have more choc chips than branded versions or even supermarket own brands. Though google says the top brand has the same 25%.

dealyboy

@PLRFD said:

I wonder if it says not suitable for freezing because it’s already been frozen once ?

Yes, that happens with cheese.

Longwalker

Penguin_ said:

Brie said:

Lidl coleslaw and potato salad are still the best of the bunch by far.  Much preferable and cheaper than Waitrose.  I love the M&S potato salad but it's half the size of the Lidl one and the OH prefers the Lidl one so that's an extra vote for it.

We get the deluxe coleslaw, it's the only bit of naughtiness in our work salad lunches! It's the best coleslaw around.

The deluxe coleslaw is unbeatable for taste. and value. Unfortunately Ive stopped buying it because A - its really price hiked, and B - for some reason it never has more then 3 days shelf life in my store. The bog standard one always has a longer shelf life and for a basic range, it too is 100% better then Tescos 

Longwalker

maman said:

Like @harz99, I'm fortunate in having all the stores listed very close to home. It still takes time though so I tend to stick to Aldi weekly for most things (Sainsbury's for the ever decreasing number of things Aldi don't sell) and just visit the other stores occasionally and buy long life products for the store cupboard. Farmfoods, for example were selling cannellini beans at 19p a tin last week.

We dont have the vast amount of supermarkets to choose from so Im very fortunate that Tesco, Home Bargains and Lidl are in a line in my town and all have free parking 

I Find Im using HB a lot more then before covid.

I lifted a garlic bread from Lidl yesterday. Ive always been pretty happy with the 32p Simply one. However on opening it, there was no garlic butter on it. Luckily it only took me two minutes to make garlic butter and dinner went ahead on time. I pm'd them saying I understood that cuts were being made everywhere but surely garlic butter was requisite to garlic bread. Told to take the wrapper back for a refund

Brie

maman said:

Thanks for the heads up @Brie, which potato salad do you recommend? I can see a number listed, with yogurt or creme fraiche and others. 🤔

As @Penguin_ mentions the deluxe coleslaw is the one I like.  The others are fine but that's my favourite and it generally lasts a good week once opened (unless I eat it of course...).  As for the potato salad I've never had one I didn't like but tend to for for creme fraiche as it makes it sound posh.  

thriftytracey

I can recommend the Lidl Tomato and Basil fresh soup.  It is very tasty, sometimes it has too much pepper and then sometimes it doesn't!

This week there were no Birchwood cooked chicken breast - instead a vastly inferior "Simple" cooked chicken breast.  I hope the Birchwood has not gone for good.

Pollycat

thriftytracey said:

I can recommend the Lidl Tomato and Basil fresh soup.  It is very tasty, sometimes it has too much pepper and then sometimes it doesn't!

This week there were no Birchwood cooked chicken breast - instead a vastly inferior "Simple" cooked chicken breast.  I hope the Birchwood has not gone for good.

I like the Aldi tinned version of tomato & basil (although I've not bought it for a while).
Very different taste & texture to the cream of tomato.

YoungBlueEyes

Yep that's the ham trimmings, they're usually laid flat on the bottom shelf of the fridge if that helps? 

I agree about the coleslaw and potato salad, both very tasty. The luxury coleslaw is creamier and less sweet and I'll sometimes lift one if I'm feeling rich The potato salad - we've tried them all I think. One of them (I can't remember which one, naturally) wasn't as thick and creamy as the others, so now I swirl the tubs about a bit to see which one is gloopiest. Maybe it was the yogurt one that was a bit thin... a blob of mayo sorted it out, but still. 

Those cartons of crispy fried onions - a handful of them on top is pure lovely

Cornucopia

From my Sainsbury's experiment, there are also a couple of possible bad buys from Aldi.  

Predictably, these were both fresh fruit & veg - strawberries and baby plum tomatoes.   Both were better tasting and possibly fresher than recent Aldi equivalents.   The strawberries were an Aldi price-match ("Imperfectly Tasty") and the tomatoes were 5p more than Aldi.

maman

It seems that the Aldi price match isn't always the 'imperfectly tasty' version from Sainsburys.

The past two weeks the imperfectly tasty cauliflowers in Sainsburys have been bigger, better and cheaper than Aldi or the price match ones in Sainsburys. 

Also Sainsburys price match (per kg) their loose white onions to the bags in Aldi. I prefer to pick out a few large good quality onions as the ones in Aldi bags have been tiny lately. I hate peeling onions so that suits me fine. 😁