To ask about your food snob specifics.

[Writerwannabe83]

I'm eating some sandwiches and I've had to use some really shitty bread that my DH purchased and it's frankly ruining my lunch

I'm more than happy to buy own shop brands but I really do believe that some things have to be the 'real thing' and I will not buy cheaper versions to try and get a better deal.

My list includes cereal, nice bread, tea bags, Nutella and pasta sauces

What about every one else??

I'm not much of a food snob...I have jar sauces and stuff if I need to rustle up something quick for the kids but I have got into making my own pasta recently and I can't go back to the supermarket variety

I make a range of shapes including farfalle, tag and spaghetti in big batches

It says a lot about the British and our attitude to food, when we refer to those that love the good stuff and paying a bit extra for it as a load of stuck up ponces who look down on the rest of us with a sneer.

Has to be Tilda Basmati Rice
Has to be free Range Eggs
Has to be HP sauce
Has to be Typhoo
Has to be decent branded Shampoo and Conditioner with no Parabens
there must be more but can't think...

Oscar Mayer streaky bacon. Everything else just cooks wrong.

kvetch - I totally agree.

A decent cook with knife skills can make a tomato sauce in 3 minutes- minus cooking time.

Ingredients may be the same- but take the same pile of bricks you could make either a bus station or a cathedral.

Processes make things taste different too- a sauce made with sliced garlic will taste differently to one made with chopped garlic.Timing is important- add black pepper or basil at the end of cooking and you get a different flavour than if it is added at the start.
Cooking time plays an important part- a bolognese cooked for half an hour will never reach the same sublime flavour as one simmered for 3 or 4 hours.

Aside from the fact that the "pure" onion or celery used in factory produced sauces will probably be a condensed form in a huge plastic tub , or frozen, or an imported pulp. All 100% of course, but themselves through some other process.

Add the fact that a jar of sauce may have lain on the shelf for 6 months before purchase- I notice a taste in my hm sauce after a day in the fridge.

All these factors have a massive influence in the way food tastes- and why jarred sauce tastes so rank.

I will NOT eat salmon that has come out of a tin.
And when I used to drink coffee (sob, no more...) it could NEVER be instant.

I have a few kinks:

1. Only de Cecco pasta will do.
2. I only buy my plain white everyday potatoes from Waitrose.
3. The milk has to be non-homogenised Duchy Originals Organic.
4. The coffee has to be Taylor's of Harrogate's Rich Italian Blend.
5. There is no ketchup but Heinz.

Everything else, I just go for price.

Yy to free range eggs.

Mine is wine. I don't like Echo falls et al. I've been blindly bought them from people in a bar not knowing what they've bought me. It is like vinegar, I can really taste the difference. However, I am partial to wines from Lidl and Aldi, and they taste better than the ones you but for Sainsbos and Tesco's for £££ more.

Coffee - We have a Nespresso Machine and since getting it I just can't handle much else, instant doesn't taste good to me anymore, but if it had to be instant it has to be Carte Noir or Douwe Egberts pure indulgence.

Tinned tomatos - I like to buy mid range ones rather than the cheapest/basic ones.

Ketchup - it has to be heinz, as a child living in the middle east there was an amazing ketchup that we loved, but we've not found anything similar here in the UK so Heinz it is!

Mayo - Now I'm dutch, we love mayo. I don't like most english ones, Hellmans is deplorable! I really, really hate it, it tastes like plastic, ew! Here in the UK, if I've ran out of supplies from my last trip to the Netherlands then I'll buy Heinz. There is unfortunately no similar product to my fritessauce here :(

Coke over Pepsi!

Green Giant sweetcorn, always.

No others are coming to mind right now, but I am sure there is more!

Oh and butter!

Butter only, no marge, its horrible stuff and just tastes wrong.

I buy nearly everything from Aldi or Lidl. Lidl do the best chocolate spread and my kids say it is better than Nutella. I like their butter with salt crystals in for bread and butter - basics salted for toast etc. I prefer Aldi ketchup and mayo now as I find Hellmans gluey. I do by Jamaican patties from Asda and I believe only one brand do the salt fish version. I don't like basic pasta(although I did buy spaghetti from Lidl once and it was edible) but the pasta sauce from Lidl ( when I CBA) with the pink lid is yum.

Our local garden centre has a butchers attached and the stuff he sells is lovely, really, genuinely good quality meat. So we don't buy meat anywhere else any more. And for tea, I love loose-leaf darjeeling. I can't think of anything else I'm picky about. The boys, however, are picky buggers and can tell if ketchup is Heinz or not blindfolded.

There's a farmers market twice a month in a village not far from us, we go occasionally for a prance with the children and a gawk at the organic veg. The kids stand there trying all these artisan breads then let us down entirely by yelling "But Daaaaaaad, why can't we go to KFC on the way home?"

The biggest food snob I've come across was a very poorly hedgehog we found in our garden as kids.

Advised to feed him dog food, he rejected the cheapo Kwik Save own-brand stuff we bought for him, until a neighbour gave us half a tin of Pedigree chum, which he wolfed down. It proved to be his last supper, and I still admire that hedgehog for sticking to his food-snob principles and making it a good one. RIP.

Yeo Valley butter
on Cranks bread, sometimes toasted
with Frank Cooper's Vintage Marmalade - dark, bitter, thick bits of rind.

That is all.