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Pinterest icon The letter “P” styled to look like a thumbtack pin. I reviewed a dozen tomato sauces. I tried red sauce from 12 brands, including some restaurant and artisan selections. The Prego, Classico, and Ragù tomato sauces were the worst of the bunch. Still, supermarket shelves are stocked with an array of convenient options, though it’s hard to know which actually live up to the hype and hefty price tags. So I tried 12 basic, nationally distributed red sauces to find out. I chose tomato-and-basil formulas as opposed to marinara since freshness-forward recipes are better for gauging the quality of the tomatoes and brightness of the seasonings, which can get muddy if there’s a high proportion of oil.

Additionally, marinara sauce can get thinned out over pasta because of its strained nature, which would defeat the purpose of the review. I first tried all of the pasta sauces on their own straight out of the jars to get a baseline before the heat would activate the acidic and herbaceous notes. I then heated up 2 tablespoons of sauce spooned onto cooked, unsalted, and unoiled pasta for 14 seconds in the microwave. This method expedited the liquefaction of the sauce, so I could better critique the emulsification. As for the pasta, I opted for Banza chickpea cavatappi for its medium size and ability to grip onto sauce within its ridges and hollow center. Read on to find out how these different sauces stacked up.

A well-known brand sold in supermarkets nationwide, Prego seemed like a good place to begin. Stirring the sauce, I found it had a medium consistency with some cubed tomato chunks. It tasted sweet from the get-go, and even more so when returning to it after trying the others. Warmed up, this already-watery sauce thinned out only a little bit more, but it got really sweet, the sugars concentrating with a caramel-like quality and becoming the prevalent theme. Bertolli’s red sauce had a nice, warm flavor.