Do not reheat | Tesco steak chasseur

Andrew Harrison
Saturday 13 May 2000 23:00 BST
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Tesco Healthy Eating Steak Chasseur, 450g, £3.99 rating 2/5

Can I suggest a name change for this dish? Healthy Eating Flavour-Free Cow-Chew Adrift In A Tomato Lagoon. "Less than 5 per cent fat" in the ready-meal dictionary, usually translates into "less flavour than a boiled copy of the Reader's Digest." But needs must when you can feel saturated fats coating your ventricles like poorly applied plastering. Anyway, I reasoned, it's steak. How boring can it be?

Pretty boring, as it happens. Duly nuked, the steak chasseur amounted to a few strips of greying beef adrift in a bubbling orange pond of sauce.

Supernaturally tiny mushroom slices lapped against shreds of tomato as I poked at the rubbery meat, wondering how affluent the allegedly rich white wine sauce could be if it moved like water. I thought better of transferring it to a plate and set to work with plastic fork and disposable spoon.

The beef was of tyre-tread consistency. I gnashed and pulled at a couple of bits in futile manner and then decided I'd best treat them as croutons in a sort of soup. Ha! If there was white wine in this sauce it wasn't showing itself, and the only quality making a play for my attention was a sort of stickiness that stayed in between my teeth for days. I forced down half of the dish and felt about as healthy as, well, someone who'd eaten a boiled Reader's Digest. That, at least, was rich.

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