Our Top Rated Jarred Pasta Sauce

[Music] jarred pasta sauce is a 2.4 billion dollar industry here in the united states now it's a great shortcut but only if the sauce is good so jack's here and he's going to tell us which jarred pasta sauce one are tasting yeah the good news is two of the ten sauces we recommended the bad news eight are just awful two out of ten yeah two out of ten so there are some things here that if you pick them i'm going to judge you very harshly so these are all plain sauces you can dig in they're lightly warmed we did them with spaghetti we made lasagna these are plain so no cheese no cream no wine no big chunks of vegetables and no meat it is a marinara sauce there literally i was at my supermarket this weekend counted 68 choices there are literally 68 at just one supermarket and so these are the plain sauces from the 10 leading brands first thing that you notice is sweetness level so there should be a little bit of sugar in them from the tomatoes so our winner has three grams um that doesn't seem like a best look [Laughter] i might frost a cake with that later it's pretty sweet yeah so when you see sugar or corn syrup on the label that's not a good thing some of these sauces had four times as much sugar as our winner and they were basically way too sweet second place these can go wrong is they're flat they're dull they have no tomato flavor so if you see tomato paste rather than whole tomatoes that's a bad sign tomato paste is cooked it's great if you want to add a little oomph and a small amount to a chili or a stew but in a fresh tomato sauce you want the product that is as close to fresh as possible which would be whole tomatoes next herbs that are just way over the top you want to taste the tomatoes not the oregano not the rosemary the thyme seems like you have an opinion about that one on the end it's very close to ketchup yeah which i love ketchup on a burger i don't want it on my sauce very sweet well next thing we looked at is wateriness so i have a little prop here these have been in a coffee filter for several hours our winning sauce you can see there's very little liquid that comes out of here in fact when we did this test it was 82 solids and 18 liquid and this really made a difference when we did the lasagna test when we used this sauce which was 43 liquid 57 solid besides the fact that it's bland water doesn't taste very good it made the soggiest lasagna imaginable it was just basically a mess right and so the watery sauce is a bad thing last thing fat if it has olive oil it's a good thing right our winning sauce has eight grams of fat and some of the losers had almost no fat in them which is not only about how it tastes but how it clings to the pasta that if it was out the fat the sauce was at the bottom of the bowl and would not cling to the spaghetti this is interesting this is completely smooth i don't like that doesn't seem homemade to me you would like it to seem to the person that you're serving it to that you cooked all day right exactly that someone made it in their home if not me right that sounds like a good thing right so i'm going to start with the one i'm not crazy about okay i want to get this off the table this one that i do not like so this is bertolli it was number eight out of ten i put this on the table for you because it is incredibly sweet it is so sweet and they're way too many herbs i like herbs but not dusty stale old dried herbs no i think the herbs in here were from the reagan administration maybe they just did not taste right all right and this one the huns last place it is made with tomato paste so no fresh tomatoes you know whole tomatoes it has really no fresh flavor it tasted like canned tomato sauce not pasta sauce but just tomato sauce well look it comes from a cab there you go and this one this was my favorite my faith in you is always constant you did choose the winner the expert panel chose this this is the rayos the audience landslide favorite you can stay we can all stay it's the best sauce it's made with tomatoes rather than tomato paste there's no sugar herbs were under control there is some bad news here okay it's expensive this is almost ten dollars this is a case of you are getting what you pay for the only other sauce that we recommended which from a company named victoria it was also seven dollars for a jar and so these cheap sauces they taste like they're cheap it's good to have a shortcut but not taste that way well there you go the winner of our tasting for jarred pasta sauce and there was a clear winner it was rose homemade marinara sauce it's 9.39 for a 24-ounce jar [Applause] thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 433,119

Keywords: pasta sauce, jarred pasta sauce, best pasta sauce, tasting, cooks country, americastestkitchen, cooks illustrated

Id: AK5S50gHSX0

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020