Christmas sandwiches tested: which have been naughty and which are nice
We filled a basket with the first crop of Christmas sandwiches – find out which ones we thought worthy of your lunch money and which to avoid like the Grinch.
Pret Christmas lunch
★★★★☆
Too much going on here – piles of slightly-too-dry stuffing and a clumping of fillings in the middle. But saved by high-quality turkey, crispy onions (a masterstroke) and a solid cranberry sauce. It does, however, lose marks for its poor structural integrity – good luck eating this on the move.
£3.60
Tesco Healthy Living turkey & trimmings
★★☆☆☆
This sandwich promises much – good bread, spinach, sage and onion stuffing – but its main ingredient is flakes of reconstituted turkey-ham, which is unforgivable.
£2
Costa turkey feast
★★★★☆
Unusual in its shape – square! – this sandwich is a real contender. A high percentage of meat and nice, sharp cranberry is somewhat let down by a surfeit of mayo.
£3.50
Starbucks turkey feast baguette
★★★☆☆
This one has a USP: it’s hot. What it also has is “turkey gravy” that tastes like smoky barbecue sauce. That said, it’s a pleasant sandwich, rather shabbily constructed but by no means a disaster.
£3.99
Sainsbury’s turkey with pigs under blankets
★☆☆☆☆
First bite contained a bone fragment and it didn’t get much better: poor quality meat, terrible construction, soggy bread. Worse, the combination of cranberry sauce and apple puree makes it taste like a dessert gone terribly, terribly wrong.
£2.20
M&S turkey feast
★★★★★
Simple but brilliantly effective. Herby stuffing that tastes like something you’d want to eat on christmas day mingles with high quality turkey and slivers of bacon. This sandwich doesn’t aim too high but gets all the basics just right. This is our Christmas champion.
£3.90
Boots brie and cranberry
★★★☆☆
This is a stark, utilitarian Christmas sandwich. Its spartan design bets all its chips on the brie and it pays off. The spinach stops the bread getting soggy and the cranberry is pleasantly tart. Few risks and few losses.
£2.50