The whole thing's off: Tesco chicken arrabbiatta sandwich

Tesco says arrabiatta, I and the whole nation of Italy say arrabbiata – let’s call the whole thing off.

This is the only non-English word on this sandwich pack (unless you count di-acetyltartaric) – would it be asking too much for them to check the spelling? Even Google knows better. Search for ‘arrabbiatta’ and it wags a pedagogical finger: ‘Did you mean “arrabbiata”?’ I can only assume they do. But it is just rude. Foreign words have spelling too, you know. How scornful would Mr and Mrs Tesco be to find (not that it’s likely) toad in the holle in the ready meal section, or a slice of Victoria spoonge?

Secondly: what’s this chilli bread all about? It illustrates the insidious trend afoot for combining flavours that complement each other into a weird, chimerical whole. Ponder, if you will, M&S' avocado flavour tortilla chips. And now this. Please, “food innovation teams” - just because we enjoy a ham roll doesn’t mean we want you to invent hammy bread or, indeed, bread-flavoured ham. Using fish/egg-flavour rice kernels in kedgeree would not be a really great idea.

And you don’t serve chilli-infused arrabbiata sauce with chilli-flavoured pasta, for chrissakes. Arrabbiatta sauce, though, I don’t know.

So, what does this ill-conceived monstrosity have to offer?

It's wonderful. The flavours of chilli and tomato are elegantly balanced, the meat of excellent quality and the assertive sauce exactly like one I once enjoyed in my favourite Roman trattoria. And how wrong I was about the chilli bread – it’s delectable - a real inspiration.

Ha ha ha. You can’t be fooled, dear readers. Not for a minute, and I’m fond of you for it.

Of course, the sandwich is in reality monumentally vile. The chicken “tastes” of claggy chicken blotting paper, and the tomatoes of claggy tomato blotting paper, just as both you and I suspected. But it’s the sauce that makes a crap sandwich into an aggressively life-impoverishing experience.

It’s outrageously sweet - like ketchup mixed with Thai sweet chilli sauce then cut with with icing sugar into a nasty, chemical jam. A look at the sauce ingredients reveals: tomato, followed by sugar. More sugar than tomato paste. It's like a bloody Victoria spoonge.

But really fiery. Too hot, I’d say – and I'm a chilli-head. That’s probably the dried chillis studding the bread. So I’m getting confectionary sweetness, soggy bulk without flavour and appreciable pain. If anything, this is even worse than the Tesco paella sandwich of infamy. 

Whatever this “arrabbiatta” is, I’m not ordering it again …