Aldi... what do you recommend?

Long way from South Carlow😭

Those items usually get dropped after summer, I'll have a look in my local because I am down to the last few!

The funny thing is that Aldi were the first supermarket in Ireland to think of selling premium Irish steaks. At the time the steaks in other supermarkets were rubbish. In time, the other supermarkets followed suit. Now, it seems that Aldi have been left behind and have left their quality slide. Over the last few months, Tesco's premium range of steaks has been really good.

The cheese bakes are back! Hurray!!!

I found them today when I was looking for two other things that seem to be missing....

No packs of soup veg (carrot/parsnip/potato/broccoli/cauli etc) .

And no roasted monkey nuts - what's that about?? All the Hallowe'en stuff has been in for ages, but no nuts to be found anywhere. I've seen some "raw" ones in the likes of Supervalu, but I love the roasties. Lidl and Aldi used to be great for huge bags of them, but not this year......

Ive more or less stopped buying any meat from Aldi except maybe if a full chicken is on offer. As said the quality on the steaks has gone down and the special offers on things like stewing beef and mince have more or less dried up on the Super 6 meats which is now full of stuff I dont want. Used to always stock up on those two items when they were on offer but since they've stopped doing it have shopped around and theres really little price difference between Aldi and Dunnes with Dunnes having better quality meat imo. Right now Dunnes is cheaper than Aldi on stewing beef which never happened in the past.

My Dunnes has a James Whelan butcher and while they are expensive for rib eyes they have started doing cheaper steak cuts which are still really good quality. Had a salt dry aged Glenarm Denver steak on Saturday night and it was delicious and well worth the 5.44 price.

Also Im using the 10 off 30 vouchers in Dunnes so its around 33% off if you get close to the 30 euro target. On my last shop I got 32 quid worth of meat in Dunnes for 22 euro. It was 1kg pork loin, 1.4kg stewing beef, 570g round steak mince, 454g lamb mince and a 260g Denver steak from James Whelan butchers.

And sometimes you'd get fillet in the sirloin box.

Anyone use Aldi Pancetta? I’ve been using it for ages and they had a second choice this week so I tried it albeit being dearer, hated it…didn’t even finish the meal I made with it.

(Just to say the regular Pancetta both smoked and unsmoked is excellent)

I’ll give it a try 😊 Though as I said the regular Aldi one is great but am afraid they are dropping it for what I consider an inferior product.

Well they may not have discontinued their standard variety but the new one they got in was not to my taste at all and dearer. I must look at buying pork belly which is what pancetta is and slice and dice myself. (Hopefully no water in it either) I could go on a rant about water in pork and bacon…😈

It’s cooked many ways but I’m pretty sure if it is sliced and chopped it is the same as Pancetta…I have used various other cuts of bacon and the fattier ones are superior no doubt. I am going to take a look for pork belly this weekend. I’ve heard it’s delicious roasted but I eat egg Carbonara about twice a week so quite a different animal so to speak 😋

That’s a heavily spiced and salted Pancetta…