‘Perfectly textured – moist, fluffy’: the best supermarket falafel, tasted and rated

Herbs, spices and love may be the secret to great falafel, but which supermarket versions hit chickpea perfection and which are over-processed duds?

• The best tinned and jarred chickpeas

It was surprisingly hard to find good, traditional falafels in the supermarkets for this test. While most of those on offer were delicious, many had long, complex ingredients lists, other than two standouts made with just chickpeas, herbs, spices and sodium bicarbonate.

Even some of the better falafels had unnecessarily long ingredients lists, despite being relatively minimally processed, but at their worst, some of these falafels were much more processed and included dehydrated potato flakes, pea protein, refined soya bean oil and stabilisers. The best, however, were delicious and contained lots of herbs, spices and even love.