M&S have been a bit of a weird brand this year. They seemed to severely limit their vegan range of food at the beginning of this year, and recently they have taken the tactic to place all vegan options throughout the store along with their non-vegan foods, essentially removing any vegan-only section of the store. I understand the marketing strategy behind this (encouraging people to pick up a vegan option over a meat option since they are sat next to each other on the shelves) but I have found that in my local store it was really hard to find vegan options because I was never quite sure where to look. I also admit that I am not someone who buys from M&S too often as I haven’t seen any new vegan products in their store for quite some time.
But I did also have a craving for a bit of a fancier pizza this weekend so decided to check out their pizza meal deal options. Annoyingly, the only two vegan options available (at least at my local store) were either cauliflower bites or onion rings. I decided to try the cauliflower popcorn because at least this is not a very common side that I have seen offered outside of actual restaurants. But slight spoiler alert…I should have tried the onion rings.
These cauliflower popcorn bites are…fine? They are very small. The whole portion is quite small for two people and the actual cauliflower chunks are also quite small. There also seemed to be a lot of the popcorn bits that were nothing but batter. Taste wise, they are actually quite bland on their own. The packet does come with a sweet chilli dip which I do have to admit is delicious. I think without this dip, the bites would be very disappointing.
The worst thing for me though is that these bites are very oily. This means that the outside of the bites, which you want to be a really crispy bread crumb to compliment the very soft cauliflower middle, is just always soggy. The instructions say to cook these for 10-12 minutes, but even after 20 minutes they were still a little bit soggy due to all of the oil in them. Which was quite a shock for me as I didn’t think there would be any oil in these, but the baking tray I used to cook these in my oven came out with a literal pool of oil around the bites. I found the oil didn’t really add anything to the bites flavour wise, so it was a bit disappointing to see just how oily these came out once cooked. Also not great if you are looking to try these as a healthier side option than say chips or something similar, but the amount of oil in these would clearly negate much of this ‘healthy’ option.
Being M&S, these are of course rather expensive. Their pizza meal deal meant that I was able to buy these cauliflower wings at quite a discount, as two pizzas and two sides meant the whole meal was £20. On their own, these cauliflower bites were £5 (I believe that the prices do vary depending on what store you go to and the location of the store so the price may be different for you) which does seem quite expensive for what was, unfortunately, a very small and very bland side dish.
Taylor Talks Vegan 