Pasta Sauce on the Cheap
When it comes to the best jarred pasta sauce, Rao's Homemade wins plenty of taste tests. It also costs upward of $10 per jar. So what about store-brand offerings from Walmart, Target, or Aldi? Can any of their pasta sauces — which cost about one-third as much — come anywhere close to matching Rao's? We sampled six brands of tomato-basil sauces, tasting them plain and with pasta and bread to see how they stacked up. The results follow, ranked best to worst.
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Aldi's organic pasta sauce didn't have a lot of personality, either, apart from a strong kick of dried basil and a healthy dash of salt. But it possessed a pleasant texture and lacked the tomato tang that overwhelmed other sauces. Pasta mellowed the herbal sharpness, and we could see this making a good base for a beefed-up sauce with some added ingredients or in a 
This jarred sauce came closest to the kind we remember from childhood family spaghetti dinners. Although it had no more sugar per serving than most of the other sauces in our taste test, Target's sauce had a tasty touch of sweetness the others lacked, which countered the bright, herbal flavors reasonably well. The texture was a bit thinner than we prefer, but that can be remedied with the addition of dried parmesan cheese and maybe a sprinkling of red pepper flakes.
Rao's has earned accolades from America's Test Kitchen, Martha Stewart, and Bon Appétit, and has made enough best-of lists to convince us of its worth. But tasting is believing. Rao's has a deep, rich color right out of the jar, with just enough savory depth to balance the brightness. The perfect blend of texture and thickness, the sauce clings to pasta without being pasty or watery. It tastes like what you'd expect to get in a good American-Italian restaurant in New York — which is exactly how Rao's started out. Its Bronx restaurant is still in business, 
