Morrisons Naturally Wonky Potatoes, 2.5kg

Product Information

People struggling to afford food are seeking support from a range of sources. The government undoubtedly has an important role at the central, national and local level supporting people through this crisis. People will also be turning to local charities and community groups. However, the fundamental role of supermarkets in the UK’s grocery market means that these businesses have a key role to play in supporting consumers. As part of this, it’s essential that supermarkets provide a basic range of budget lines across their stores to support healthy choices, especially in places where people are most likely to need support to avoid poor quality diets and, as our research increasingly shows, hunger. The consumer champion’s Affordable Food For All campaign calls on supermarkets to do more to ensure own-brand budget line items are widely available throughout all branches – including in smaller ‘convenience’ stores. They should also make pricing and offers more transparent. And it goes without saying that pretty much all of these meals would be greatly improved with a sprinkle of cheese or some kind of condiment - but sadly my budget didn't allow for that! Carefully tip 1/2 the potatoes into one tray and the remainder into the other. Allow them to sit flat in the oil. Season well with salt.

Place the potatoes in a large pan of cold water with just enough water to cover them. Add a good pinch of salt and bring them to the boil. Simmer for 5-6 minutes until the potatoes are cookedThe first big choice that will determine the success of your mash is the variety of potato. Only last week, and even with the crown of potato royalty weighing heavy on my head, I mashed red skin potatoes that were just simply too waxy. In the end it turned out I had made – please forgive me – gloopy mashed potato. It happens to the best of us. To identify store size we used the roof size as a proxy, the data for which was provided by Geolytix. Small stores have a roof size less than 280m2, mid sized stores between 280m2 and 1,400m2, large stores between 1,400m2 and 2,800m2 and very large stores over 2,800m2. For ease of analysis we then combined mid and large stores to create the mid-large category used throughout the analysis. The values reported here are medians and the boundaries are the same as used in the Priority Places for Food Index. Asda has very few small stores in the UK and so we did not include any small Asda stores in our study. The small stores referred to are made up of a balanced number of Morrisons Daily, Tesco Express and Sainsbury's Local stores (see figure 7 below). Previous Which? research found that people using convenience stores could be spending hundreds of pounds a year more than buying in a supermarket or online. The very poor availability of budget items from our list in small stores would have distorted all our further analysis of this data, consistently dragging median availability values across stores down in a way that would not have been representative of true budget line availability in mid-large and very large stores. For this reason, we chose to exclude small stores data from the rest of our analysis, allowing us to give an accurate description of budget line availability in mid-large and very large stores. Availability of budget lines is good in high priority places, in large stores

Wherever possible the same items were selected for each supermarket. Where this was not possible, we chose the closest substitute available. If no close substitute was available then that item was excluded from the basket for that store. For instance, because of the variation in the budget ranges across supermarkets, we asked shoppers to look for beef mince at Asda, pork mince at Tesco, pork and beef mince at Morrisons and we did not include mince at Sainsbury's because they did not have a budget-range equivalent available at the time of fieldwork. Because of this variation in the budget ranges of supermarkets, the size of the basket for each supermarket varies slightly, but averages 29 items. As part of this work, The Food Foundation has produced a new short film about the Cost of living Crisis entitled ‘ They Know We Are Here ’ (Produced by The Food Foundation and Spark Films and shot on location in Birmingham and Solihull in March 2023) For my money, you want a starchy potato. These require a lot less encouragement to break down, meaning less starch is released. The result? A fluffier mash. The varieties you should be looking for are Maris Pipers, King Edwards or Vivaldi.I’m definitely eating out less, and probably batch cooking a bit more, getting more frozen stuff. I'm not getting fresh fruit and veg [anymore], I'm getting vegetables that I can put in the freezer.” Which? Consumer Insight panel member Prices have risen across all categories, but inflation is particularly high for milk, cheese, eggs, oils and fats. A range of factors have driven food prices higher, including global commodity price hikes, higher energy prices, supply chain disruption, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Paying the price Put your potatoes in cold, heavily salted water and bring it up to the boil (rather than adding them to already-boiling water). This will stop the potatoes overcooking on the outside and cook them more evenly. If you salt them during boiling, you do not need to season them at the end. Having been a chef for a decade, it’s been drilled into me to remove any and every suggestion of a lump from mashed potato (or pommes purée , as it’s called in the swankier places I’ve worked, where it’s swiped across your plate and sold at quadruple the price). Lumps have no place in professional mash and anything less than a velvety-smooth texture is a sin.