If there’s one thing you get to eat a fair bit of at Christmas, it’s bread sauce. As bread sauce reviews (and some of the bread sauces themselves) are fairly bland, I thought I’d spice it up a bit this time and turn it into to a contest. So, in the red corner we have Colman’s Bread Sauce and in the blue corner we have Schwartz Luxury Bread Sauce. Which one tastes the best? There’s only one way to find out! Er, no … not like that.

To make this a fair test, I’ve tested each bread sauce twice along with a roast chicken dinner, obviously not all on the same day. (Well, I’ve got to eat, haven’t I?). Each packet was made up per the instructions and served straightaway, as if you’d save it for later anyway.

So, here’s the review in a handy little table you can cut out and stick on your wall. All scores are given out of 10, with 0 being the worst score and 10 being the best.

* Paxo bread sauce is no longer available, but it’s the best packet bread sauce I’ve ever tasted. Clove-tastic.

** All packet bread sauce seems to come out really thin these days. If you want it thicker, put in about half the amount of milk stated on the packet. If you do this, the Schwartz packet mix is actually quite a close approximation of how I remember Paxo bread sauce used to be, nice and thick.

So, which one wins? To be honest, none of the figures above really matter apart from the last line. Colman’s bread sauce is bland, has an overpowering taste of onion which I really don’t like, and doesn’t have any cloves in it so it doesn’t have much flavour. Whereas the Schwartz bread sauce is definitely helped by them remembering to include cloves, and cream powder, and not too much onion. So for me out of these two the Schwartz one wins.

Both these bread sauce mixes are widely available from big supermarkets in the UK.  Other bread sauces are available.  For full details see next week’s Radio Times.  No Wellington boots were harmed during the production of this article.