Dear Pret, this is what a £7 sandwich should look like

You don’t need to spend £7 on a ‘posh’ sandwich. Comedian and chef George Egg shows how it’s done by making a bigger, better one for under £5

Pret a Manger: all polished steel and plum branding like a Noughties idea of what the future would look like. Seeing as they’ve not updated for a couple of decades I suppose they were right. And I’ve noticed that the Veggie Prets are disappearing – turning back into their maroon-coloured cousins as the meatballs come apologetically rolling back onto the shelves. Maybe their customers need that extra protein to help them stomach the prices. Very clever – a menu whose prices elicit such shock and awe that you need the caffeine hit of a double espresso to help you cope.

Their “posh” cheese baguette, containing cheddar, pickle, roasted tomatoes, red onion, cress and an ungenerous-sounding “touch of” mayo, has been seen for sale at a whopping £7.15 (including VAT), a price that makes me want to pull the manager aside to ask “where on earth are you getting your cheese from?” And while you’re at it, Pret, I think the word posh is a poor choice too as calling it such pretty much confirms that it isn’t (see Victoria Beckham).

I thought I could do better.

Let’s talk sachets. I’m not suggesting you pinch them, but every time you grab a few when visiting a big chain pub, motorway services or fast food restaurant, you’ll often find you’ve picked up too many. You’ve touched them now and if they don’t go in your pocket they’ll be off to the bin. Once you start looking, you’ll find there’s a lot more out there than just ketchup and mayonnaise, so start a collection.

You’ve got £7.15 to play with and you want something extraordinary, so think budget supermarket, more interesting ingredients, and, well, more, by which I mean bigger. So I’ll start with a whole baguette (95p). If I’m aiming for “posh” then I want two types of cheese – half a tub of soft cheese (47p) and to give it a more “itchy” lip-smacking tang I rippled with a breakfast pot of Marmite (hotel buffet pilfer), topped with half a pack of mature cheddar slices (£1).

Our sandwich is twice as long and a fraction of the price of Pret’s (George Egg)

I can do a lot better than cress, roasted tomato and chutney (which in Pret’s effort was so sweet it made the whole thing taste like a jam sandwich), so I went for: a quarter of a sliced cucumber (20p), a third of a bag of radishes (17p), half a red onion (9p), and a third of a bag of mixed peppery leaves (27p), all from budget supermarkets.

I wanted this sandwich to be full of flavour and attractive too so I nipped to the eye-wateringly over-priced Borough Market and bought a superbly flavoursome heritage tomato (70p) and a candy beetroot (14p) to add colour and class, finishing the salad element with a whole punnet of cress (25p).

I made my own version of chutney mixing half a finely diced apple (15p) with a couple of gherkins (10p) and a couple of sachets of HP sauce (looked like chutney, tasted even better. I mean, apple and cheese? Come on). A bag of cheese and onion crisps from a multi-pack for garnish and added crunch (17p) and all finished off with a second sauce made from four sachets of mayonnaise and one of mustard slaked down with a splash of water to achieve a drizzling consistency.

Their £7.15 effort was 25cm long and 253g. Mine was 50cm long and came in at a rather substantial 1.04kg. It cost £4.66 and was also absolutely delicious… well the quarter of it that I managed before having to take a lie down, anyway.

Pret is good for something, though. It’s the perfect place to go and see how much sandwiches are going to cost in the future.