Carefully tip 1/2 the potatoes into one tray and the remainder into the other. Allow them to sit flat in the oil. Season well with salt. I’ve delved so heavily into potato recipes over the last two years that I have been dubbed the ‘Potato Queen’ online. My videos on social media have had over 200 million views and even Nigella called me the ‘High Priestess of potato’. Most people in the UK will have a potato masher – that decades-old utensil that you can never find in the drawer. However, here’s where things get juicy: I don't think that masher is doing your potatoes justice. To conduct this study, Which? worked with the specialist agency Mystery Shoppers to audit the availability of a range of budget items designed to support a healthy diet across the four largest supermarkets using a traditional business model in the UK: Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Tesco. When it comes to achieving that perfect mash though, people rely on loads of different methods – each household has their own way of doing it.

For a slightly different - and easier- teatime option, I chose to buy a frozen cheese and tomato pizza for 66p, which would go well with chips made from our wonky potatoes in the oven or air fryer. However, in small Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco stores we found a very different story, with budget line items very rarely available, even in the places where people are most likely to be struggling to access affordable food [ 17].To identify store size we used the roof size as a proxy, the data for which was provided by Geolytix. Small stores have a roof size less than 280m2, mid sized stores between 280m2 and 1,400m2, large stores between 1,400m2 and 2,800m2 and very large stores over 2,800m2. For ease of analysis we then combined mid and large stores to create the mid-large category used throughout the analysis. The values reported here are medians and the boundaries are the same as used in the Priority Places for Food Index. Asda has very few small stores in the UK and so we did not include any small Asda stores in our study. The small stores referred to are made up of a balanced number of Morrisons Daily, Tesco Express and Sainsbury's Local stores (see figure 7 below). The very poor availability of budget items from our list in small stores would have distorted all our further analysis of this data, consistently dragging median availability values across stores down in a way that would not have been representative of true budget line availability in mid-large and very large stores. For this reason, we chose to exclude small stores data from the rest of our analysis, allowing us to give an accurate description of budget line availability in mid-large and very large stores. Availability of budget lines is good in high priority places, in large stores Put your potatoes in cold, heavily salted water and bring it up to the boil (rather than adding them to already-boiling water). This will stop the potatoes overcooking on the outside and cook them more evenly. If you salt them during boiling, you do not need to season them at the end. This is particularly important in those areas where people are struggling the most - and so supermarkets need to prioritise the stores that they have in high priority places, ensuring that they offer an adequate and healthy range of essential budget lines that meet the needs of the local community. The Priority Places for Food Index provides a tool to help them identify these areas where people are likely to be most in need. Section 3 presents our recommendations to supermarkets for how they can better support their customers through the worst food inflation in 45 years.

Almost 87,000 supporters have signed Which?’s petition so far calling on the supermarkets to take action.

Breakfast ideas:

Most of these meals could also be bulked out with extra vegetables from my 1kg bag of carrots, tin of garden peas, or bag of salad. I was also relying on the fact that most people would already have basic seasoning such as salt and pepper - and some type of cooking oil - already in their cupboards. In this report, we present new rigorous research undertaken to explore the extent to which the UK’s major traditional supermarkets are offering a range of basic budget line essentials to customers across their stores, particularly in high priority places. Using mystery shoppers, we explored the availability of a basket of essential items across stores of varying sizes in a range of locations. Methodology Before heading into store, I tried to think of substantial and - reasonably - healthy meals that I could make with as few ingredients as possible.