Tesco Kitchen Foil

I don’t use a lot of foil, mostly when I cook in the oven, I use sealed dishes instead as it’s better for the environment. However, there are a few dishes that I make which do much better if I use foil therefore I do generally keep some in the house.

The brand that I buy tends to vary according to where I am shopping when I need it, but the most recent roll was this one from Tesco.

I wish someone would do foil on a roll without a box because truly it doesn’t really need one. This however, like every other foil I’ve ever found in a supermarket does come in a box. Blue these days not like the one in the picture, with the details of the product on it for anyone who’s interested – to me a box is just... well, a box!

The foil itself is rolled on a sturdy cardboard tube. There are two different widths and 300mm and 450mm, and you can get both in 10metre lengths and the narrower one in a 30 metre length too. Because I don’t want to be wasteful with packaging I tend to buy the longest I can find so that it lasts a long time and I’m not buying more packaging too often, so with this I went for the 300mm wide 30 metre long roll which cost me £4.

When you open the box, the open edge is serrated which in theory allows you to ‘cut’ the foil by ripping it along the edge. In reality these rarely work, and often leave you with a jagged edged piece of foil that isn’t the size you want it to be, so I normally use a pair of scissors so I get a piece that’s tidy and the size I want.

I know foil can in theory be used to wrap food for keeping it fresh in the fridge or freezer, but I never do this. I really only ever use it in the oven for wrapping gammon steaks or fish. If you ARE going to use it to wrap food for storage, don’t use it on acidic items such as grapefruit when it will touch them as the aluminium in the foil will react with the acid.

For gammon Steaks, my favourite way to cook them is to take a small (about the same size as the gammon steak if possible) deepish tray and then place a piece of foil about three times the length of the gammon steak in it. Onto this, I place the first gammon steak, then tinned pineapple rings, and dried apricots. Tilt up the edges of the foil, and then pour in the pineapple juice from the tin and place the second gammon steak on top. Then I wrap the foil around the lot to make a nice package that can’t leak. You want a good seal that’s quite close to the meat so all the juices stay in which is why foil works best for this rather than using a casserole dish. I cook it in the oven for about an hour, and then serve it with baked potatoes and something like peas or green beans. Yummy!

Overall this is just as good as most foils I’ve bought. It’s not so thick you feel your being wasteful, but at the same time, it’s not so thin that it tears when in use.