The Packaged Deli Meat Brand To Ignore If You Want Flavorful Sandwiches

Is there anything better than a personalized sandwich stuffed with deli meats, cheese, condiments, and pickles? Toss in some crunchy salad leaves and a scattering of onions, and you have a gourmet meal on your hands that takes mere minutes to assemble. Having some protein prepped in the fridge makes it much easier to whip up a scrumptious sarnie at speed, which is why packaged deli meats are such a popular choice over roasting and slicing your own beef, turkey, and chicken. However, there's one packaged deli meat brand to ignore if you want a flavorful hoagie — Land O'Frost.

The loser in our list of the 12 best packaged deli meat brands, ranked, the Land O'Frost products we taste-tasted were lacking in flavor and watery when it came to texture. There was plenty of meat inside the packages, such as oven roasted turkey and Black Forest ham, which is a boon if all you want in a homemade budget-friendly sandwich is lots of protein. However, their taste was disappointing, which is a huge problem if you like the flavor of your deli meat to be the most prominent element in your sammies, wraps, and salads. Call us particular, but we reckon each variety of deli meat should have its own distinctive flavor that shines. While the brand's peppercorn beef was the best of all the meats we tried (as it had extra flavor from the speckled peppercorn beef edges) there were far better options from the other brands we nibbled on.

Deli meats that are minimally processed tend to have a richer flavor than meats bulked out with water and additives. For instance, Land O' Frost's deli shaved oven roasted turkey is made with mechanically separated turkey, water, turkey stock, and soy protein, which may explain why it has such a flavorless quality. As a general rule, the healthiest and tastiest meats have a short ingredients list, no added salt, and are free from preservatives called nitrates, so always check out your deli meat label to double check you're getting the best bang for your buck.

Our favorite deli meat brand — Boar's Head — doesn't add filler, byproducts, artificial colors, or flavors to any of its products, which explains why it beat all the other contenders (such as Hillshire Farm and Oscar Mayer) in our taste-test. This provider of high quality delicatessen products uses whole cuts of poultry, pork, and beef to make their variety of deli meats, including maple honey ham and pastrami rounds. The meats we tried weren't paper thin, which meant they had some substance to them. Moreover, they had a delicious flavor and an inviting texture that didn't dry out.