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Manchester Evening News
Manchester Evening News
Entertainment
Damon Wilkinson

I got all these Greggs items in Iceland for as little as half the price - here's how they compare to the real thing

Four orange squares on a blue background and the enticing waft of baked goods.

Walk through any town or city centre in the UK and you're never far from a branch of Greggs.

Britain's most popular bakery chain produces an astonishing 2.5 million sausage rolls a week and sells 50,000 doughnuts an hour.

But, not content with taking over the high street, the Newcastle-based firm is now coming for your freezer drawer too.

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Greggs has teamed up with Iceland to offer a frozen, bake-at-home range of some of its most popular products.

And I've been given the task of seeing how they measure up to the real thing.

After filling up the freezer the first thing to compare is the price.

A box of eight sausage rolls from Iceland is £3.75.

That works out at about 47p per roll, compared to £1.05 each in Greggs.

Steak bakes and chicken bakes are around £1.17 each when you make them at home, compared with £1.65 in the shop, while the vegan sausage rolls are 50p at home, and £1.05 from a bakery.

So the Iceland ones are a fair bit cheaper.

But you've obviously got the hassle of making them yourself and as I lay out everything out on a baking tray I notice some oddly specific cooking times.

The chicken bakes need 32 minutes in the oven, while steak bakes require 29 minutes.

I decide to split the difference and bung everything in for half an hour, setting a 25 minute timer on my phone to take the sausage rolls out a bit earlier.

As it cooks the houses fills up with the comforting smell of warm pastry.

It's a trick of the trade that Greggs uses to good effect, with staff encouraged to keep the doors of their shop open so the aromas tempt customers in.

Thirty minutes later it's time to eat

I like Greggs as much as the next man, but as I consider the intimidating mound of pastry laid out in front of me I worry I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

Thankfully I've roped in the rest of the family to help me out.

But I fear the youngest daughter isn't going into this with an open mind.

"Actual Greggs will be better," she says, nailing her colours firmly to the mast as she sits down at the table.

"Actual Greggs is WAY better," she declares moments later, after demolishing half a shop-bought sausage roll and half a home-baked version, before wandering off in search of the cookie I got her for pudding.

By contrast, the rest of the family are treating the taste test with the respect it deserves.

Across the table my wife's channelling her inner-Gregg Wallace as she diligently compares pastries, crumbling the corner of a steak bake between her fingers.

"There's very little in it," she says after much deliberation.

"I can't tell any difference in the fillings, but the pastry's different.

"It's much drier and flakier in the Iceland ones. I think there's something about the Greggs ones being stored in the shop at the right temperature."

The eldest daughter is of a similar mind.

"I like the Greggs' ones better because the pastry's softer," she says.

For what it's worth I agree. Just looking at the two versions of each product side-by-side, it's immediately obvious which is which.

The pastry on the home-baked food is darker and noticeably less-moist.

But that's probably down to me failing to follow the cooking instructions to the letter, rather than the products themselves, and to my uncultured palate the fillings also taste identical.

So I guess in the end it comes down to convenience.

If you're craving a Greggs it's not that difficult to nip to the actual bakery, there are more than 2,000 branches across the UK after all.

But for those occasions when you just can't be bothered to leave the house the bake-at-home versions are perfect and that bit cheaper.

For my part I feel like I've had my Greggs fill for the foreseeable future.

The problem is I've now got a freezer full of the stuff.

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