McCain Oven Chips: €1.59 for 750g €2.12 per kg Highs:McCain has been making oven chips for generations, so it is hardly surprising that they make a pretty good stab at it
The chips have quite a decent potato flavour, are uniform in shape and turn an equally uniform golden brown colour when cooked. They are additive-free and widely available. McCain deserves to be commended for using the traffic light system on the labelling to make it easier to see how much sugar, salt and fat is in a portion.
Lows:While they may look nice and crispy, they're surprisingly spongy in texture when cooked - they're not soggy by any means but do lack a bit of crunch - even when they spend well over the recommended cooking time in the oven. They were also a little on the greasy side.
Verdict:Old school and reliable.
Star rating: ***
Green Isle Chunky Oven Fries 1.3kg €2.99 €2.30 per kg
Highs:These are decent chips which crisp up very well and taste absolutely fine. They come in a big bag and the chips range in size from somewhat stubby to absolutely enormous. They are more versatile than the competition and can be cooked in the oven, grilled or fried if you're really pressed for time.
Lows:While the bag tells us proudly that these chips are free from artificial flavours, they are not so free of salt. Why do they come pre-salted when we're perfectly able to put salt on them ourselves? it was hard to gauge exactly how much salt we were consuming as the nutrition information is a bit vague. It tells us how much sodium is in each portion, but it doesn't bother converting that into salt. They are also on the pricey side.
Verdict:Nice and crispy.
Star rating: ***
Marks & Spencer Fresh chips €3.09 for 450g €6.86 per kg
Highs:Of all the store-bought chips, these look the most upmarket and the most home-made. They taste almost as good as if you had chipped the spuds yourself and are pleasingly erratic in shape. They crisp up beautifully, thanks to the healthy smearing of unsalted butter on each chip and have a lovely, floury centre.
Lows:They are very expensive and a single packet - containing no more than 32 chips, we counted them - will not serve two people as Marks & Spencer claims, unless they are both pretty restrained.
At 40 minutes, these had twice the cooking time of the other store-bought options and even after that length of time, many of the chips were still a bit pasty looking.
Verdict:Lovely but dear.
Star rating: ****
Loose Rooster potatoes €1.49 per kg
Highs:These taste much, much better than the competition and given the complete absence of processing they endured before ending up on our plate, they are fresher and much more wholesome that anything else on the market. They're cheap, very widely available and require only the most basic of culinary skills to prepare. The chips are irregular in shape and as long as they are liberally sprayed with good oil, they will crisp up beautifully.
Lows: The potatoes have to be peeled beforehand which was a minor inconvenience when cooking for two and would be an almost insurmountable obstacle if you were catering for more than four people. They take a long time to cook and you'll need to be careful with the oil or they will turn into a greasy mulch.
Verdict:Cheap and wholesome
Star rating: ****
Harvest Basket oven chips (from Lidl) €0.79 for 1kg
Highs:These are remarkably cheap. The fact that Lidl can sow, harvest, chip, process, bag and then ship these potatoes over from Germany and still manage to make money by selling them at half the price of a kilo of the raw product in your local Tesco is little short of miraculous.
They also look a lot like real chips.
Lows:Sadly, however, they taste nothing at all like real chips. They're cooked with hydrogenated oil which might do wonders for their shelflife, but absolutely nothing at all for their appeal.
They have a peculiar and entirely unpleasant aftertaste that completely kills any potato flavour that may once have existed.
Verdict:Cheap as chips, but nothing like them.
Star rating: *
