I don’t actually tend to eat cereal, but someone suggested cornflakes for a Taste Test post, and it seemed like a good idea. It’s exactly the sort of thing where there is a dramatic price variation between different brands, but it’s unclear if that’s actually reflected in the quality of the product. I mean, cornflakes are just cornflakes. Aren’t they?

Also, a side effect of this project has been that I ended up with a lot of cornflakes in my kitchen. Really, a lot. And for those of you who do eat cereal, where do you store those boxes? They are huge. They take up pretty much all of the counter in my tiny tiny kitchen.

Anyway, I’ve basically spent the last couple of weeks coming up with inventive ways to use up cornflakes. Did you know that you can use cornflakes as a crumb coating for fried chicken? And that it’s actually super delicious? So delicious that I might actually consider buying more cornflakes solely for this purpose when I have used up all the ones I already have. Also, I had biscuits left over from last week, so I combined the cornflakes and biscuits (and other stuff, obviously), and made tiffin. Let me tell you, chucking a couple of handfuls of cornflakes into a tiffin mix is a truly excellent idea. It sort of makes the finished product a cross between a tiffin and one of those cornflake nest cake things you ate at Easter as a kid. In other words, really tasty. And worryingly addictive.

Did you know they add loads of extra vitamins and minerals to cornflakes, by the way? I did not know that, but if you look at the pack they have added B12 and iron and all sorts. I feel super-healthy after eating all that cornflake tifin and cornflake fried chicken.

As before, I feel I need a rambling disclaimer: obviously, I am doing this in my kitchen and not in a lab and I am not a scientist. These are the opinions of one person – that said, one person who has been trained to taste for quality. Also, the products used in this series are just examples – obviously each supermarket has, say, eight or nine different types of cereal or whatever the product may be, and I’m not going to try every single one because what am I, made of money?

Finally, I should highlight that I tasted all the products blind, and at the time of tasting and making my notes I didn’t know which product came from which shop. I sat in one room while my glamorous assistant (er, my husband), prepared the samples in another. Any notes added regarding packaging and so on were only done after blind tasting, when I learned which who had made product A, B, C, D, or E.

The Blind Taste Test: Cornflakes

A – Aldi (Harvest)

B – Sainsbury’s Organic

C – Waitrose

D – Kellogg’s

E – Tesco Everyday Value

Conclusion

Wait, no comments? No breaking down into A, B, C and so on? No. You know why? Probably yes, you do.

All of these samples of cornflakes tasted exactly the same to me. Pleasingly crunchy, a little bit sweet at the end, fairly bland, as you would expect cornflakes to be. I started off eating them dry, to make sure I was getting the taste testing experience without interference, and then I tried them all with milk. They all tasted the same.

So the moral of the story is that you might as well buy the budget version. The cheapest – Tesco Everyday Value – are 40p and the most expensive – Kellogg’s – are £1.75.