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I’m on holiday this week, and I badly need to be dealing with angry royalty, if you know what I mean, so here’s one from the archives – my first taste-test of the cheapest versus the most pricey…

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So I’ve been curious about how much difference very expensive ingredients make to cooking. Hence, I’m going to try to do a series of taste tests pitting “average” ingredients against the best I can reasonably buy.

The first one: Pasta. In the red corner, famous deli Valvona & Corolla’s La Molisana pasta, price £1.10 for 500g. In the blue corner, Asda/Wal-Mart’s own-brand fusilli, price 34p.

I prepared a very simple dish – pasta al dente, with extra virgin olive oil (the expensive Lidl one) and parmesan (reggiano, again from Lidl).

The differences became obvious pretty much immediately – the ASDA pasta went floppy whilst the V&C was still undercooked. But how would it taste?

The ASDA pasta tastes pretty much like the pasta you’d expect – it just missed al denta, and came out floppy, very smooth-tasting, and turned to paste and disappeared pretty much as soon as you put it in your mouth. Comforting food, but lacking texture in particular, and also any definite taste.

The V&C was definitely nicer. It put up a bit of a fight, for starters, coming apart with a rough floury texture that left you in no doubt very good flour had been used in its creation. It had a definite taste to itself, faint but definitely there, like unleavened bread, and the oil taste worked extremely well with it.

There’s no doubt that for a dish this simple, the V&C pasta is vastly superior- in fact, I’d say it was pretty much essential if you’re going to be doing anything this simple – it adds the extra flavour that’s vital for something this minimal.

However, in any pasta dish with a more definitely flavoured sauce, I’m not so sure. The extra texture of the V&C pasta would definitely enhance the dish, but not as much as other decent ingredients, and the subtle taste that makes the V&C such a winner with olive oil would definitely be lost even under a simple red sauce.

Overall? Buy the V&C, for sure, but keep it for dishes where the pasta and the pasta alone will be the focus of the dish – minimalist lunches like this and perhaps some pasta salads. For everyday eating, whilst it’s nice, other ingredients that are less expensive per dish and have a greater effect on the sauce will provide better value for money.