One Trolley, Three Classics: We Cooked a Full Chinese Banquet Using Nothing but Lidl

There's a stubborn myth floating around British kitchens that Chinese cooking demands a shopping list as long as your arm and a trip to a specialist grocer. So we decided to put it to the test in the most brutal way possible: one trolley, one budget supermarket, zero shortcuts from the cupboard stash. Everything — the sauces, the aromatics, the rice, the meat — had to come from Lidl on a random Tuesday afternoon.

The rules were simple. Three dishes: sweet and sour pork, egg fried rice, and beef in black bean sauce. No sneaking in the good soy sauce from the back of the cupboard. No emergency jar of chilli oil. If it wasn't in the trolley, it didn't go in the wok.

The Shop: £23.47, Give or Take

The receipt read like a decent pub quiz round. Pork shoulder steaks, beef braising steak, two peppers, pineapple tin (more on that later), eggs, a bag of long grain rice, spring onions, garlic, fresh root ginger, and — the real test — Lidl's own versions of light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, rice vinegar, and a jar of black bean sauce.

Total damage: £23.47. That's less than a family takeaway from most high streets, and it bought enough for four generous portions plus leftovers.

First hurdle: no Shaoxing wine. Lidl didn't stock it, so we subbed in dry sherry from the wine aisle — a swap Chinese restaurant chefs have quietly used for decades, so we didn't lose sleep. Second hurdle: no sesame oil on the day. We survived.

Dish One: Sweet and Sour Pork

The pork shoulder steaks were £2.79 for two, and honestly, shoulder is the right cut anyway — fattier and more forgiving than loin. We trimmed, cubed, tossed the meat in cornflour (yes, they had it, 89p) and fried in batches.

The sauce is where things got ideological. Purists will tell you sweet and sour sauce is vinegar, sugar, ketchup and patience. Lidl's answer was a bottled version at 79p. We tried both: the bottle straight up, and a homemade version using their vinegar, sugar and a squidge of own-brand tomato ketchup.

Verdict? The homemade one won comfortably — brighter, sharper, less like a nostalgia bomb. The bottled stuff wasn't offensive, but it tasted like 1997 in a bad way. The tinned pineapple, at 45p, earned its place. Some traditions deserve defending.

Taste: 7/10. Authenticity: 6/10. Cost per portion: £1.90.

Dish Two: Egg Fried Rice

This is the dish where budget supermarkets either shine or shame themselves, because there's nowhere to hide. Rice, egg, spring onion, soy — four ingredients, all of them cheap anyway.

Lidl's 55p bag of long grain rice cooked up fine, and after a stint in the fridge overnight it fried beautifully. Their light soy sauce was the surprise of the whole experiment: properly savoury, decent colour, no weird sweetness. At 85p a bottle, it would happily sit in my fridge permanently.

The only real compromise was the eggs — their basics eggs fried up pale and a bit watery, but scrambled into the rice, nobody would ever notice.

Taste: 8/10. Authenticity: 8/10. Cost per portion: 74p. This is the dish that proves the whole thesis. You cannot make bad egg fried rice at 74p a head.

Dish Three: Beef in Black Bean Sauce

Here's where the false economy showed its face. Braising steak at £3.49 was the most expensive protein, and without a proper marinade (no Shaoxing, remember) it came out chewy. Slicing it thin against the grain helped, but this was the dish where the missing pantry really bit.

The jarred black bean sauce, though, was a genuine shock. Salty, punchy, properly fermented-tasting — we'd have struggled to pick it from a premium jar in a blind tasting. At £1.29, it's the single best-value item on the receipt and the reason this dish still scored respectably.

Taste: 6/10. Authenticity: 7/10. Cost per portion: £2.40.

So Is Chinese Cooking Actually Expensive?

No — but the experiment taught us something more useful than that. The savings aren't in the exotic ingredients; they're in the basics. Rice, eggs, soy sauce, garlic, ginger: Lidl matched or beat anything else we've priced up, and quality didn't suffer.

Where the budget approach wobbled was texture and depth — the marinated beef, the fresh-fried pork with proper seasoning. Those are the gaps a well-stocked cupboard fills, and they're the reason we'd still recommend building up your own sauces and spirits over time.

The full banquet came to £5.87 a head, fed four people generously, and left enough rice for tomorrow's lunch. That's not a compromise. That's just good shopping — with one or two jars worth upgrading once payday rolls around.