We Taste Tested 22 Of The Best Jarred Pasta Sauces To Find The Winner

Jarred pasta sauce can be a lifesaver. Having one or two knocking around your pantry guarantees an easy meal is in reach—you can add meat or vegetables, doctor it with spices or just dump it on some noodles and call it a day. The best jarred pasta sauce should taste good right out of the bottle, on pasta or as a dipping sauce, and not lose its flavor or pick up unpleasant notes when heated. After rigorous testing and tasting through 22 different bottles, my pick for the best jarred pasta sauce is Rao’s Marinara.

In addition to Rao’s, I identified seven other sauces that stood out:

There’s a huge variety of jarred pasta sauces out there, from bespoke versions that include ingredients like hot honey to more standard grocery store fare. All of them do the same job, but not all of them taste great. Some candidates have a texture that’s thin, or tomato notes that lean sour or mealy. The jars that passed our testing had consistent flavor and texture, and tasted just as good spooned lukewarm from the jar as they did heated and poured over a tangle of linguine. Below, the best jarred pasta sauces, according to our extensive taste tests.

Pros:

• Works well over plain pasta, as a dipping sauce or as the base for cooked dishes like parmigiana
• Has a balanced and restaurant-quality flavor

Cons:

• Consistency is thick and may not be for those who prefer a thinner sauce
• Relatively expensive

In a blind taste test of 22 jarred pasta sauces that I tried, Rao’s Marinara was the resounding winner. All seven other taste testers selected it as the winner, with just one person putting it in a tie with Michael’s Of Brooklyn Fresh Tomato & Basil. Rao’s Marinara hits a combination that proved elusive for other sauces: a velvety texture, a texture that’s thick enough to feel hefty but avoids having salsa-like chunks in it, and a great balance of tomato, oregano, pepper and olive oil for a flavor that stands out for its brightness and savoriness.

The ingredient list is fairly simple: Italian whole peeled tomatoes, olive oil, onions, salt, garlic, basil, black pepper and oregano. It doesn’t have added sugar or too much salt, and it’s as close to a restaurant-quality as any of the jarred options that I tasted. As one taste tester said, “It tastes the most homemade.” It was great spooned directly out of the jar and even better poured over cooked pasta, nicely coating the noodles. Other contenders felt either too doctored with spice and garlic and onion, too acidic, too watery or not tomato-y enough. Rao’s struck just the right notes.

When heated up in a pan with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, Rao’s didn’t lose any of its flavor or texture. It’s also widely available at most major supermarkets, and doesn’t require specialty ordering from a website or hunting down a gourmet grocery store that carries it. The major drawback of Rao’s is its expense. On the Rao’s site, a 24-ounce jar, enough to dress a pound of pasta, is listed for $8.99 (other retailers, like Amazon, may list it for a hair cheaper, but you’ll rarely pay less than $7 a bottle for the product). That’s certainly more than most grocery store brands—but the quality is extremely high and the flavor is excellent.

Bottom line: If it’s in your budget, Rao’s Marinara is absolutely the best jarred pasta sauce to pick up.

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Pros:

• Can be built on with spices or meat without losing its flavor
• Of all testing contenders, tasted the closest to a homemade version
• Tastes even better tossed with starchy noodles

Cons:

• Not the best on its own or as a dipping sauce

Jarred vodka sauce is a tricky category. A good vodka sauce usually has a fair amount of dairy—cream, butter and cream or cream and parmesan cheese—and that’s hard to incorporate into a high-quality shelf-stable sauce. The winner of the blind taste test for this category was Bertolli Vodka Sauce, which did the best job presenting a vodka sauce that had notes of creaminess balanced with the slight sharpness of vodka, all rounded out by tomato and spices.

The vodka sauce category was the weakest category of all the jarred pasta sauces that I considered, with many candidates tasting more like a marinara or a plain tomato sauce than something with the signature tang of a vodka sauce. One candidate, the Carbone Spicy Vodka Sauce, instructs you to add two cups of cream to the sauce before serving, which felt like cheating. A good jarred sauce shouldn’t require extra ingredients to be tasty, and not everyone has two cups of cream every time they’re grabbing a jar of sauce from the pantry for a quick meal. Other jars had off-putting acrid notes, or an overwhelming smack of fake cheese.

Bertolli Vodka Sauce was the stand-out winner because it managed to best approximate a great homemade vodka sauce. On hot pasta, it improved further, with the starchiness of the noodles enhancing the flavor of the sauce. And once heated and doctored with a little bit of salt, pepper and olive oil, it was clearly better than the other contenders. It’s an easy jarred sauce to build on, if you’re so inclined—a little bit of red pepper flakes makes it slightly spicier without negating the creaminess of the sauce.

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Pros:

• Has a just-right level of heat
• Is a well-balanced and appropriately thick-textured sauce for numerous applications

Cons:

• Pricier than other contenders

Arrabbiata sauce is a slightly less common style of jarred pasta sauce in U.S. grocery aisles, but if you’re someone who prefers a spicier option, you’re likely already familiar with it. It’s a tomato sauce from Rome that includes hot red peppers to give the end product a bit more of a kick than a traditional marinara. Of the four options of arrabbiata that were contenders, the winner in my blind taste test was from Rao’s.

Like Rao’s marinara, their arrabbiata had the best texture, thickness and flavor balance of the bunch. It was as good lukewarm from a spoon as it was tossed into a bowl of pasta, and the level of heat was one that built fairly gently but wasn’t overwhelming—at least for most of the testers. One taste tester called it “a more peppery sauce, and less of everything else,” but it still beat out the other candidates. A close follow-up was Carbone’s arrabbiata sauce, which a tester observed has “a super deep rich flavor” but with a thinner, more uneven texture compared to the Rao’s. It also didn’t combine quite as nicely with the starchy pasta.

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Pros:

• Has a rich meat flavor
• Is balanced enough to taste homemade

Cons:

• Once again, on the costlier side

Of the relatively few jarred meat sauces on the market, the winner of our taste test was Rao’s Bolognese. This sauce had a surprising amount of meatiness for a jarred product, along with undergirding notes of carrot and onion. It was enough to push me past my wariness of shelf-stable meat sauces in general. The sauce’s richness comes from the use of both beef and pork in the sauce, plus a smattering of pancetta, giving it the distinct savoriness of a Bolognese that you might find in your local red sauce joint.

Other meat sauces we tried ended up veering too aggressively toward the spice or vegetable direction. The Williams Sonoma Sicilian Sausage Ragù, for example, smothered the sausage flavor with strong notes of fennel, and the Just Like Home Chicago-Style Bolognese tasted resoundingly like bell pepper.

Rao’s, again, is a more expensive sauce than the average jar from the grocery store. But it came out ahead on all three flavor challenges: It was excellent straight from the jar as a dipping sauce, great slathered on noodles and just as good when heated up and cooked slightly.

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Pros:

• A solid budget-friendly sauce
• Has great flavor and texture without needing additional seasoning or cooking

Cons:

• Herbs and spices in the sauce aren’t subtle
• Only available at Whole Foods

If you’re looking for a jarred pasta sauce that you can stock up on without shelling out for something as expensive as Rao’s, the favorite more budget-friendly tomato sauce in my taste test was the 365 Organic Tomato And Basil. While the flavor of this sauce wasn’t as nuanced as Rao’s, it was still a solid sauce that was particularly good when poured over pasta, without being doctored with salt or pepper.

It’s a very oregano-forward sauce, and it’s sweeter than our overall pick, but it’s got great texture and a nice acidic balance of tomato flavor. It tastes slightly more processed than other sauces, but not in an off-putting way. One of my taste testers called it “good like a Dorito is good: You can tell it’s manufactured but that doesn’t make it less delicious.”

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Pros:

• Great flavor doesn’t get lost in baked or cooked preparations
• Takes on additional seasoning well without losing integrity
• Not as readily available as other sauces

Cons:

• Fans of smoother-textured, less-chunky sauces may not love this
• Pared-down ingredient list means some may find it plain out of the jar

When chefs choose a jarred tomato sauce, they look for one that has the highest-quality ingredients so that they can add th