Chicken tikka masala is one of the most popular Indian dishes in Britain and has become something of a national favourite. Usually, the dish contains diced and roasted chicken in a mildly spiced masala sauce. The sauce is usually creamy and slightly reddish, orange in colour.
Today we carried out a taste test of four of the most popular supermarket’s chicken tikka masala ready meals – all in the interest of scientific research. The supermarkets were: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencers and The Co-op.
With the curries numbered from 1-4 so they remained anonymous, eight people from the Curry Culture team tasted them and scored them all out of 10 for taste and appearance.
We also checked if anyone could guess which curry was from where and how expensive they were.
The results were calculated by adding the results together so scores are out of 80.
Here are the results
The winner is…
Sainsbury’s £3.60
Taste: 56/80
Appearance: 55/80
Comments:
“Nicely spiced & flavoured”
“Would purchase this in the future”
Second place
Co-op £3.45 (cheapest)
Taste: 51/80
Appearance: 55/80
Comments:
“Nice & creamy”
“Nice chicken”
Third place
Tesco £3.54
Taste: 49/80
Appearance: 60/80
Comments:
“Oily on top, too creamy”
“Nice quality chicken”
Last place
Marks and Spencer’s £3.65 (most expensive)
Taste: 35/80
Appearance: 43/80
Comments:
“Chicken tasted fake”
“Oily on top”
The results came as a shock, as most of us went in thinking that Marks and Spencer’s, the most expensive of the meals, would be the nicest and look the best. However, the results show that Sainsbury’s tasted the nicest and the Tesco’s curry looked the best out of the four, in our humble opinion.
This experiment shows that the most expensive curries are not always the tastiest, there was also a considerable difference in the taste between what were supposed to be the same dish.
Feel free to get in touch and let us know what your favourite supermarket curry is and we will hot foot it down to our nearest branch and give it a try.
