16 hours ago
3
As the owner of a sandwich shop, I was delighted when the Filter asked me to taste and rate the best high-street Christmas sandwiches. I’ve been making sandwiches professionally for 11 years and (of course) at home for much longer. In my shop – Max’s Sandwich Shop in north London – we have a sandwich mantra: hot v cold, sweet v sour, crunchy v soft. The presence of these three core contrasts is, I believe, the key to a great sandwich. Also, I have a liberal attitude to mayonnaise.
To test Christmas sandwiches, I got stuck in – trying each one thoroughly rather than taking just one bite. It would be a tall order to expect a factory-made supermarket sandwich to perfect the contrasts laid out in my sandwich mantra, but I did look for them to be created with contrasts in mind.
I was also on the lookout for festive innovation (not just red cabbage and baby spinach, which appear to be the default bulking agents of many Christmas sandwiches), interesting ingredients mixed into mayonnaise, and crunchiness – though that’s difficult (if not impossible) to achieve in a mass-produced packaged sandwich. Bonus points were awarded for extras such as great packaging or charitable donations for each sandwich sold. Scores for these sandwiches are relative to each other, not based on their positions in any broader sandwich pantheon.
The best Christmas sandwiches in 2025
Aldi yorkshire pudding wrap
Rating: 5/5
Bread: yorkshire pudding
Fillings: sliced turkey, smoked streaky bacon, pork sausage, sage and onion stuffing, chicken gravy and cranberry sauce, served with a pot of gravy
You have to bake this in an oven yourself, which is obviously a faff in a grab-and-go world. However, it has three types of meat (four if you include the gravy), which I respect enormously. Not only that, but it actually comes with a pot of gravy for dunking! This feels genuinely redolent of a leftovers sandwich; I doubt that was the intention, but I greatly approve. None of the sandwiches I’ve tried have been even faintly as innovative or interesting as this. It’s not particularly delicious – a bit dry and lacking in freshness – but as far as Christmas sandwich innovations go, Aldi has knocked it out the park with this one. It’s also a plus that it doesn’t contain spinach or red cabbage.
Pret porchetta and sage baguette
Rating: 5/5
Bread: stone-baked baguette
Fillings: slices of porchetta, sage mayo, matured Italian cheese, cranberries, shredded apple and spinach
Quite festive, I guess (cranberries, sage mayo et al), and genuinely nice. The porchetta tasted different from all the other Christmas sandwich meats I tried, which was welcome. The apple gives palpable freshness, and I like the chewy little cranberries, which have a slight acidity to them. I can’t detect the cheese – but that’s probably a plus. As so often with Pret, a notch above the rest of the high-street retailers.
Aldi beef wellington bloomer
Rating: 4/5
Bread: malted bloomer
Fillings: cooked silverside beef, balsamic onion chutney, dijon mustard mayo with sliced, seasoned roasted chestnut mushrooms and spinach
My initial thought was: “When Aldi is doing a beef wellington sandwich, we’ve jumped the shark.” But this is actually nice! It certainly doesn’t look much like a beef wellington, and there’s no pastry. The Co-op’s wellington sandwich looks much better. But there’s a very good mix of sweet and sour flavours (balsamic onion chutney and dijon mayo are great together). The mushrooms taste good, even if they don’t look great, and the beef has a genuinely good flavour. At least the spinach makes a little more sense here: it’s often in a beef wellington, albeit cooked.
Pret pigs in blankets hot roll
Rating: 4/5
Bread: hot ciabatta roll
Fillings: British pork sausages wrapped in streaky bacon, caramelised onion chutney, mustard mayo
There’s not too much bread, and the sausages and bacon are good. There’s a nice balance of sweetness (thank you, chutney) and mustard. A simple sandwich, but tasty.
Pret roast butternut squash, chestnut stuffing and pistachio
Rating: 4/5
Bread: a wrap
Fillings: roasted butternut squash, peppery rocket with chestnut and herb stuffing. Served with a spoonful of sage mayo, pistachios and crispy onions
The wrap itself is very dry, but the filling is herby and nice. I have a soft spot for Paxo, and there is a hint of it here, which must be the sage mayo. The flavour is good overall, and I like the sweet chunks of pumpkin, even though they add to the wrap’s overall softness. It’s definitely lacking crunch and freshness – I didn’t even notice the rocket. The crispy onions hadn’t held on to their crispness, and the pistachios added an odd, but not unenjoyable, soft chew.
Waitrose vegetable festive feast
Rating: 3.5/5
Bread: malted
Fillings: vegan mayo, spiced butternut squash and potato, braised red cabbage and spinach
Somehow, Waitrose has pulled this off. Even though it shares its fillings with so many of the other sandwiches here, it feels quite festive, if in a largely nut-roast manner. Texturally, this was nice to eat and not as mushy as so many of the other sandwiches.
Sainsbury’s turkey feast
Rating: 3.5/5
Bread: malted
Fillings: cooked turkey breast, mayonnaise, cranberry chutney, beechwood smoked bacon, and sage, onion and oat stuffing
Not too bad at all, although it’s lacking in freshness and acidity – a salad and/or a pickle element would have really lifted this. I know it’s not very festive, but I couldn’t help craving something spicy, such as jalapenos or hot sauce. The packaging was festive, too.
M&S ho ho ho-ney mustard ham hock
Rating: 3/5
Bread: malted
Fillings: honey and mustard pulled ham hock, sharp Cornish cove cheddar, cheesy creamy mayonnaise and fresh spinach
Ham hock is always good and technically slightly festive, I guess, but here it’s far too finely shredded and a bit mushy. The cheese in the mayo is neither detectable nor an innovation that anyone needed. The mustard flavour is strong and nice, but really this is just a (not particularly good) ham and cheese sandwich, with a bit of spinach in it. The packaging is quite festive, and I’ve awarded a bonus point because Marks & Spencer is donating 5% of sales of this sandwich to charity.
Co-op beef and truffle wellington
Rating: 3/5
Bread: malted
Fillings: roast beef, braised red cabbage, truffle-flavour mayonnaise, sage and onion stuffing, sage and onion mayonnaise, mushroom duxelles and spinach
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This looks much better than Aldi’s similar sandwich, and the palpable smell of truffle when you open it is genuinely glamorous. I wonder why they didn’t add any mustard. More red cabbage – I wonder what they really mean by “braised” in this context? Even though duxelles is closer to what you get in a wellington than the mushrooms in Aldi’s version, it has made things mushy, which Aldi managed to avoid by having bigger bits of mushroom. The packaging has a weird, minimal Christmas tree motif, which is more redolent of the tree once it’s been in your house without water for six weeks.
Tesco Finest turkey BLT
Rating: 3/5 as a BLT – 2/5 as a Christmas Sandwich
Bread: rye
Fillings: turkey BLT with smoked maple-cured bacon, emmental and gherkin mayo
Despite “gherkin mayo” sounding like a fun innovation, and the fact that there’s cheese and turkey in here, it somehow still tastes exactly like any other supermarket BLT. That’s no bad thing, though. As a Christmas sandwich, it would only be a 2/5.
Morrisons king prawn and seafood cocktail
Rating: 2.5/5
Bread: brioche roll
Fillings: king prawns, surimi and prawns in a marie rose cocktail sauce, lettuce
Surimi is what crab sticks are made from. For most people, I don’t suppose this would feel very Christmassy, but we always have prawn cocktail as a starter for Christmas lunch, so it felt festive to me – and I’ve given it half a bonus point for that reason. The packaging wasn’t festive at all, though. There needs to be lashings of filling in a sandwich like this, which there isn’t, and it suffers for it – there’s just too much bread. I wouldn’t say the lettuce was crisp, either. Marie rose typically has Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco and all kinds of things in it, but this tasted only of ketchup and mayonnaise.
Leon twisted veggie Christmas
Rating: 2.5/5
Bread: ciabatta bun
Fillings: baharat-roasted butternut squash, grilled halloumi, apricot and pine nut stuffing, cranberry, pomegranate molasses, aleppo pepper sauce and pickled red cabbage
It all sounds very good – but sadly, the eating just isn’t. The overall feeling is one of stodgy dryness, caused by far too much bread. Despite sounding as if they go together well, all the fillings have homogenised into one big sticky lump. Even with pickled red cabbage and pine nuts, any perceivable crunch is severely lacking. If you’re adding halloumi, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t also add a lick of mayo. It makes everything juicier and moister, which this sandwich desperately needs. I’ve awarded half a bonus point for Leon noticing their name is Noel spelled backwards – extremely Christmassy. The paper wrapping may be intended to be reminiscent of a pressie, and there’s a faintly festive sticker, reminiscent of the Vegas sign graffitied by the Grinch.
Leon twisted meaty Christmas
Rating: 2.5/5
Bread: toasted ciabatta bun
Fillings: pulled turkey marinated in buttermilk and baharat spices, apricot and pine nut stuffing, grilled halloumi, pickled red cabbage, honey mustard mayo, cranberry, pomegranate molasses and aleppo pepper sauce
This is essentially the same sandwich as Leon’s veggie twist, with added pulled turkey (more mush) and some honey mustard mayo (woo hoo!). The same homogenisation has taken place, meaning the separate elements of the sandwich are hard to identify. It’s better than the veggie one, thanks to that mayo, but it’s still not very good. I’ve awarded the same half a point for the Noel/Leon wordplay, and it looks much more festive than the veggie version.
Asda pigs under blankets
Rating: 2/5
Bread: malted
Fillings: tender pork sausages, smoky and sweet cured bacon and onion chutney, mayonnaise
Pigs under blankets? What a scam! It seems to just mean sausage and bacon, and it’s almost as good as any supermarket sausage and bacon sandwich – which isn’t too bad, but there’s an indiscernible weirdness to it. I assume that’s from the odd choice of mushroom in the sausages, which I found lurking in the ingredients list. It has largely the same ingredients as the Pret pigs in blankets bun, but it’s nowhere near as good: they’re inferior quality, and it lacks the mustard. Would mustard have saved it?
Asda festive Boxing Day sandwich
Rating: 2/5
Bread: white bread
Fillings: chicken, oak-smoked ham, coleslaw and balsamic onion chutney
The only sandwich with coleslaw, which isn’t very festive, but is normally a good thing. However, all I can really taste is coleslaw, and there’s an astringency to it, which isn’t appealing – perhaps there’s some raw onion in it.
Sainsbury’s mince pie wrap
Rating: 0.5/5
Bread: brioche-style wrap
Fillings: mincemeat compote, creme fraiche, caramel sauce and shortcake biscuit balls
Disgusting. I cannot see in what way this pallid, flaccid wrap is “brioche-style”. The only plus, which gains it half a point, is that it does smell like a mince pie. It looked creepy, like a cross section of an unhealthy body part, and the little balls of biscuit had gone squidgy and weird. The whole thing is insanely sweet, and the creme fraiche solidified in a horrible way. This is a clickbait abomination.
For more, read the best smoked salmon and the best Christmas ham joints
Max Halley is a professional sandwicher, the owner of Max’s Sandwich Shop in London, a cookbook shop (maxscookbookshop.com) and a handful of pubs. His first book about sandwiches, Max’s Sandwich Book, was a Sunday Times bestseller. He is the food and drink editor of Ralph Magazine, and he loves mayonnaise.
Christmas shopping can be tough – so we spent months finding the perfect presents for everyone on your list. We selected the best products from our testing; enlisted babies, kids and teenagers to find out what they really wanted; and sniffed, tasted and tested the good, the bad and the ugly to bring you 305 genuinely brilliant gifts.
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