I was not expecting a huge amount from these Iceland Food minced beef and onion bakes as they cost £1 for a box of two.

The reviews on their site are incredibly varied but overall they come out at a 3.5 out of 5 stars and honestly that is generous.

These contain beef at a whopping 7% and onion at 4% and the only seasonings seems to be garlic puree, black pepper, salt and onion powder. All this combined explains a huge amount as there is such little flavour or varied texture inside. When eating a bite I detected more like 1% beef mince as it just felt like I was consuming a gravy bake.

I will say the pastry was flaky, buttery and delightfully thin and the instructions include doing them in the airfryer that made them feel so much less hassle and budget friendly.

But are they budget friendly when reviews say things like the below? It does not really seem that budget friendly at all. Given I can get something like these cheese and onion ones or some chicken ones from Lidl for £1.39 and be very very content with just the one.

Oh and apparently there was supposed to be carrot in these two. I’m not sure if they were supposed to be carrot chunks, if so they forgot to put those in as well, if they were supposed to be pureed into the sauce or something the flavour did not come through at all either.

Iceland also sell frozen Greggs products and it partly feels like they create this really bad knock off to drive people to the Greggs one more to keep the brand partnership and probably make more profit through the markup on them. Although given these bakes are just pastry I suppose the production cost is tiny.

Regardless, perhaps I just had a bad batch where they honestly forgot anything more than the sauce but given my experience I absolutely cannot recommend and don’t want to purchase more to find out.