I have been using Sainsbury's Basics Spaghetti more or less since it was introduced into the range, long before arch meddler Martin-bloody-Lewis started telling us all we've been shopping wrongly for years!

Spaghetti Bolognese is one of my signature dishes, I've always found it an incredibly easy dish to cook and luckily everyone in my family enjoys this meal. What I cannot understand is why people insist on paying up to £2 for a packet of dried spaghetti when this 39p pack does the trick wonderfully, yes it might have a slightly more watery taste but if you think about it you'll most likely be drenching the cooked spaghetti with a rich tomato based sauce anyway so who is really going to notice?

This is a standard 500g packet which is enough for several meals, perhaps it's not quite so good for a cold spaghetti dish as it becomes quite sticky after cooling but for a hot meal with sauce it's perfectly adequate. The spaghetti takes around 10 minutes to cook once you've popped it into boiling water, it's quite a soft spaghetti once cooked so don't be afraid to adjust the cooking time if you feel it necessary.

Taste wise, well, it tastes like any other spaghetti on the market! It has a good wheaty taste and the same well rounded flavour I would expect from more expensive brands, as I mentioned earlier it has a rather watery taste when eaten without sauce but this can easily be helped by pouring some mixed herbs into the cooking water before it boils. You could always experiment with different additives to your cooking water, perhaps crumble an Oxo into it before adding the spaghetti and this will help to counteract the watery flavour.

I cannot fault this spaghetti at all, for 39p you can't go wrong with it. Spaghetti is one of those foods where pretty much every brand will taste the same so why throw your money away just for a more attractive looking packet? At least try it, if for some reason you hate it then you'll have wasted 39p but if you like it then you could save yourself a fortune over the period of a year!