Which Greggs top sellers are foodie Tom Parker Bowles’s surprise favourites? ...and which did he say could be used as building insulation?
IT’S been a good week for Greggs. Not only has the High Street stalwart posted a 27 per cent increase in annual profits (and shared the love, via bonuses, with its employees), but it’s also knocked McDonald’s off the British breakfast top spot, too.
In fact, it seems that Britain’s most beloved baker can barely put a foot wrong. Cheap and convenient, with many stores opening as early as 5am and not closing till 6pm, if you wanted, you could eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in a Greggs.
with nearly 2,500 stores in the UK (nearly 1,000 more than McDonald’s), you’re never too far from a steak bake, sausage roll or bacon butty. And if you can’t be bothered to move from the sofa, Uber and Just eat will deliver it all to your door.
Greggs is an innovator, too, a master of marketing and Pr — introducing pizzas, salads and flatbreads to the bakery staples. what you won’t find is rare-breed sausage rolls, sourdough pizza or artisan croissants. But that’s part of the appeal.
Its bakeries are purveyors of pure unpretentious pleasure, places where fingers never wag, diets are never mentioned and your easy fix of salt, fat, sugar and carb-based delight is handed over with a smile and at a reasonable price.
Here I pick Greggs’ top-ten hits. Food snobs, be damned!
A BUTTY TO DIE FOR Bacon roll, £2.90
Now this is a proper bacon roll. None of that sourdough nonsense, rather a soft white bun, lavished with butter, and filled with a mass of oven-cooked bacon. And while it’s not the best quality I’ve ever tasted (I doubt it comes from the happiest of pigs), there’s lots of it. Anoint with a great splodge of red sauce (not brown, you heathens) and you have one of the country’s great bacon rolls. A true High Street hero.
SEVENTIES’ CLASSIC Sausage roll, £1.45
IF YoU’re looking for some handcrafted, artisanal beauty, then move swiftly on. The pork is cheap and almost certainly not free range, while the puff pastry is decent, rather than spectacular. But that’s not the point, as this is a Greggs icon, and for good reason, too — it tastes damned good.
The meat is well seasoned and the pastry has exactly the right balance between crisp and golden, and a little soggy on the inside. A classic 1970s sausage roll, the sort we devoured at birthday parties, alongside Hula Hoops and warm orange squash. Make sure you get ’em warm.
MEATY TREAT Steak bake, £2.40
Now we are talking. Because this is not just the crowning glory of the Greggs menu, a gloriously meaty masterpiece, but one of the great British snacks, full stop.
Slow-cooked beef, rich and deeply flavoured, encased in the most winsome of golden, flaky puff pastry parcels. Just like the McDonald’s cheeseburger, it’s a perfectly engineered piece of fast-food art. In fact, I find it hard to pass a Greggs and not stop for a slice. All hail the steak bake.
TUNA DELIGHT Tuna crunch baguette, £4.15
THere’S no stinting on the filling, although the tuna (which actually makes up only 25 per cent of the ingredients) has been mushed into a slightly unpleasant paste. And I could do without the red pepper. really, what is the point? But I loved the raw red onion, sprinkled generously on top, and there’s a decent acidity, too, from a good squeeze of lemon. The bread isn’t bad either. In fact, I’d happily eat this again. It feels fresh, and clean. A highly respectable baguette.
SWEET SUGAR RUSH Yum yums £1.75 for 2
A MoDerN version of what we used to call ‘sticky willies’. Better known as the iced bun. But if you’re after cloyingly sweet, sugarmore glazed twists of soft dough that taste wonderful at the time, then leave you filled with regret and a pounding sugar headache, yum yums hit the spot. Beware, one bite leads, very quickly, to an empty box.
CHICKEN TONIGHT Southern fried chicken goujons, £4.10
THe chicken may be cheap, and the coating not the crunchiest, but these are pretty good. You get four decent-sized goujons, made from breast meat.
The coating is well spiced, and there’s even a nudge of chilli. If you bought these at Marks & Spencer or waitrose, you wouldn’t be too disappointed. If you found them in a service station, you may even give a quiet cheer.
A SLICE OF SPICE Mexican chicken flatbread, £4
wow, I was impressed by this flatbread. There’s a decent whack of chilli, a smoky chipotle burr, and it’s generous on the filling, too. It’s probably my favourite of all the Greggs sandwiches I tried. And as good, if not better, than anything at Pret.
BRUNCH IN A BAGUETTE Sausage and omelette breakfast baguette, £4.10
well, you get bang for your buck. Three chipolatas and three wodges of omelette, all crammed into a perfectly decent baguette. Admittedly, the sausages taste of salt than anything else, while the omelette slices are so stodgy and solid they could be used as building insulation.
But cover the whole thing in enough tomato ketchup (and Greggs do use Heinz), and it’s eminently edible. As is so often the case with Greggs, it’s best to take the dish at face value. And not look too deeply into its constituent parts.
HANGOVER CURE Pepperoni pizza, £2.75
THe last time I tasted pizza like this was a few decades back, when I was still in shorts, racing around the playground playing kiss chase. It’s school pizza to its core, but not without some basic appeal. especially the crisp, burnt bits of cheese at the edge. once again, you get a great wodge of pizza for under £3. oK, so it’s mostly dreary, spongy base. And while the cheese is cheap, it’s no worse than Dominos or Pizza Hut. There are four slices of pepperoni, which taste very good. And, I imagine, this great wodge of stodge would be perfect with a raging hangover.
BRITAIN AT ITS BEST Jam doughnut, £1.15
oNCe again, Greggs manages to whisk me back to my youth. Because this is the textbook British doughnut (as opposed to the fresh-fried fairground ring or the flashy Krispy Kreme), soft, squidgy and slightly damp, sprinkled with crunchy granulated sugar, and filled with a big squirt of wonderfully artificial raspberry and apple jam. The overwhelming sweetness is tempered by nostalgia. one for British doughnut purists everywhere.