Beanz and Blankets

Heinz have always been a good source of limited edition products for the festive season (and other times of year) - you may recall my reviews of their Christmas dinner soups, both standard and vegan. In 2024 they once again put a festive spin on one of their most well-known and loved brands, giving us Beanz with Pigs in Blankets.

While the thought of pigs in blankets in a tin might at first raise a few eyebrows, when you think about it, these can't actually be a huge step away from their standard Beanz with Pork Sausages, just with a bit of bacon added. But wait - there's more on offer here - the can promises that these are "with Christmas seasoning", really taking the festiveness up a notch or two. Note also that the front of the can makes a point of saying that the sausages used are Richmond brand, a change that Heinz has made in the last year to all its tinned products containing sausages, as part of a "mission to elevate [their] sausage portfolio", whatever that means. 

It's a bold move in my opinion, given that Richmond have a reputation for being the worst sausages you can buy, with the absolute minimum of meat in them - just 44%, according to the ingredients list. Well, being a Tin Cannoisseur who keeps records of things, I can tell that Heinz's old sausages were 55% pork, AND were gluten-free (which Richmond's are not), so you can't help but wonder if the switch was a cost-saving measure rather than an exercise in sausage portfolio elevation.

As a result I can't say I was holding very high hopes for these, despite the effusive copy on the can:

JINGLE ALL THE WAY

Need proof that Santa got your wish list? Well here it is! Beanz, pigs in blankets and Christmas seasonin all in one can. No need to wait for the big day. Crack them open for a taste of Christmas on your toast.

Nor was I particularly impressed to find that they were selling for a whopping £2.50 in my local Sainsburys, marginally reduced to £2 if you had a Nectar card. But what the hell, I thought - Christmas comes but once a year, so I went for them nonetheless. Irritatingly, in the weeks after Christmas and New Year they were knocked down in price a number of times in an increasingly desperate attempt to shift old stock - first to £1.25, then 75p, and finally just 25p a tin, which finally got them off the shelves. While I'd had great intentions of posting about these before Christmas, when you consider how long it's taken me to actually do so, I might as well have held off on buying a tin and saved myself a couple of quid.

My first thoughts on opening were that they were a lot less liquidy than standard Heinz Beanz. Usually when you open a tin of Heinz there is a layer of very liquid sauce on the top, with the beans sitting in a gloopier mass below, and you have to mix the two together. Slightly over-heating them to reduce the sauce down a bit more is usually a good idea too. No need for that here; the sauce is thick throughout. Could this be the effect of the Christmas seasoning? They also smelt more porky than beany, which was perhaps a good sign. 

When I'd rescued the pigs in blankets from the depths of the tin and scraped off the thick sauce, they did actually look the part, and five in the tin was more than I was expecting.

I heated up half a tin in a saucepan on the stove, which loosened the sauce very slightly. Serving them on toast seemed the best presentation option, but I felt it necessary to go a bit Christmassy with that too, and so went for a couple of Christmas star-shaped crumpets, which I think were from M&S. To go with: some sprouts, just to make the meal as wind-inducing as possible.

Just how Christmassy were the beans themselves though? The can had given little indication as to what the 'Christmas seasoning' might be, listing just "Flavouring (contains milk), Herb Extracts, Spice Extracts, Garlic Salt" in the ingredients. On tasting them there was very little discernible flavour to be able to work out what those herbs and spices might have been. The overall flavour was definitely more savoury than Heinz classic tomato sauce, which I find a little too sweet, so that was a bonus even if they could hardly be said to be Christmassy in flavour.

As to the PIBs - well, Richmond's finest sausages were as crap as expected - off-puttingly pale inside, and very soft with little texture to suggest what they might have been made from. It was hard to believe that they were was even as much as 44% pork in them, lending a certain irony to their use as "pigs" when they seem so far removed from an actual hog.

The blankets were little better - the joy of a real pig in blanket is of course the crisped-up bacon. Having been stuck in a tin of tomato sauce, these blankets were flabby and horrible. There was a slight smokiness to them, but I couldn't help but be reminded of old Elastoplasts, which is never a pleasant thing.

Maybe that is going a little far - overall the meal was largely inoffensive, not very different to your standard baked beans and sausages, and with the more savoury sauce, the beans themselves were arguably better than Heinz' standard offering. But the PIBs themselves - the whole unique selling point of the product - were disappointing to say the least. 

Does that even matter though, as far as Heinz is concerned? I sometimes think they produce limited edition varieties just to get people talking on social media and "engaging with their content", regardless if they're any good or not. On that front, these were probably hugely successful. Watch this space for more on that subject in my next post.

I had the other half of the tin with some somewhat overdone roast potatoes. Given that I'd had the oven on for those, I'm slightly kicking myself now for not popping the PIBs in for a bit, to see I if could crisp up the bacon. I may try that another time, as the bargain-hunting hoarder in me couldn't resist buying another tin when they were down to 25p in January.

When I did my Christmas Tinner quite a few years back (a Christmas dinner made almost entirely of tinned items) I'd had to cheat with the pigs in blankets - I had found tinned cocktail sausages, but had to wrap them in bacon myself. Had these been available then, I could have freed them from their bath of beanz and reunited them with their more familiar Christmas companions.

The beans wouldn't have gone to waste either - recently online I found this marvellous tome The Complete Heinz Cookbook, first published in 1993, showcasing the surprising versatility of Heinz products, with every recipe featuring at least one of them. I'll take you on a tour of some of the book's highlights on another occasion, but one in particular jumped out as a Christmassy use for beans - the Bean and Nut Stuffing. Yes, in the early 90s, Heinz really were suggesting that you should stuff your Christmas turkey with a mixture of baked beans, nuts and dried fruit. "This fruity unusual stuffing will enliven any bird", the recipe intro says.

I didn't inflict this on my family over the festive period to discover if that claim is true, so I will just leave the recipe and delightfully retro photo from the book for your delectation, and we will all just have to imagine how delicious it might be.