3 Best Canned Spaghetti Sauces And 5 To Avoid

The prospect of snapping the lid off a can of spaghetti sauce sounds like a home cook's dream come true, and they come with many benefits. Cracking open a can waiting in the pantry is a whole lot easier than cooking up your own pot, especially when what's waiting under the lid is wholesome and flavorful. It's also a sturdier option for stashing in the cabinet or hauling on the road for travel-based dining than sauce sold in glass jars — an overlooked benefit that perhaps only comes to mind once you've dropped a jar on your tile floor. Finally, with many canned sauces priced below the two-dollar mark, it's a more cost effective choice for shoppers trying to keep their grocery spending under control.

Grabbing the best canned spaghetti sauce on the shelf can be a tricky feat, considering your inability to view the contents — visibility points go to jarred sauce for sure. Nothing will ever live up to homemade spaghetti sauce, of course, but that doesn't mean you have to sacrifice wholesome ingredients or fantastic flavor in service of simplicity. To help you figure out what you're getting when you go canned, we picked up a selection of canned sauces for your home cooking needs and did a rundown on the quality of the ingredients in each. There's more on our methodology at the end, but for now here are the cans worth inviting to dinner and the ones that should be off the guest list.

True, it's not an all-grown-up spaghetti sauce with all the bells and whistles, but Hunt's Tomato Sauce with Basil, Garlic & Oregano offers the sauce essentials in a simple can that can get you where you want to go easily. Notice the name is tomato sauce rather than spaghetti sauce; this is because this concentrated creation is sauce stripped down to its basic components. This minimalist mix gets you from zero to dinner in just a step or two more than a finished sauce in a can would. It also means the can is half the size of the other sauces, but if the quality and flavor presented here surpasses expectations, then you may not mind the extra work required to flesh it out.

Could a can so tiny possibly contain the makings of a full-fledged spaghetti sauce? You bet your bottom grocery dollar. Tomatoes and water are the main ingredients, with enough space left over for flavorings like salt, red pepper, dried basil, and garlic powder. Use a few cans to make a more expansive sauce with other ingredients or add water and a little oil to thin it out and serve it in its simpler form. You could toss in some chopped tomatoes to give it more substance, finish it off with a shake of parmesan on top and enjoy one of your best-ever spaghetti creations — even if your pasta of choice happens to be in the form of spaghetti squash.

With its Four Cheese sauce, Hunt's considerately saves you the trouble of adding extra cheese to your recipe. It's a move that works in jarred sauces quite well, so dropping it into a canned version shouldn't be such a stretch. The ingredient list even breaks down the cheese blend into its components: Romano, Parmesan, ricotta and mozzarella made from cow's milk, salt, cultures, and enzymes. That level of detail is quite a find in a food format that sometimes tries to find workarounds that don't work — a strategy that gives Hunt's solid footing in a sector where the competition is pretty thin to begin with.

It isn't the taste that ranks this can on the "worst" side of the balance; the flavor is pretty decent, with the cheese essence rising above the rich tomato base in just the right measure. But the formula includes high fructose corn syrup, regular corn syrup, and sugar, which feels like a preponderance of sweeteners for a savory sauce. Isn't the cheese enough to make the flavor work? There's no notable sugary essence in the taste of the sauce, which points to the likelihood of the trio doing triple-duty to draw down the acidity. It sure would be nice to try it without all the extra sugar, though. It's not as off-putting as, say, using ketchup as spaghetti sauce, but you're better off going with a purer sauce and adding your own cheese instead.

Keeping it simple is usually the best route to take when dousing your spaghetti in canned sauce. With Hunt's Garlic and Herb, you have one of the most straightforward flavor combinations in the great Italian cookbook — a robust blend of zesty herbs and punchy garlic to give the tomato zing a little extra oomph. There's no reason to think a brand like Hunt's couldn't come up with a high-energy spaghetti sauce you can pop the top on and pour over your best bowl.

Thank goodness the sauce has the juice to make pasta even better! It's not simply the flavors of garlic, parsley, basil, and other unspecified spices (onion powder and oregano are likely candidates); it's the bits of these add-ins lending texture to give a true homemade toothiness to the sauce. The only thickener found on the label aside from the tomatoes is modified potato starch, and while both sugar and sorbitol appear to lend balance to the acidic tomatoes, it's a relief to find no trace of corn syrup in the listing. Flavor-wise, this is a straightforward selection that lets you play dress-up with your pasta without compromising your culinary principles. If taste counts as much as nutrition on your table, Hunt's Garlic and Herb makes a great choice for maintaining both.

If you're going to offer a traditional spaghetti sauce in canned form, shouldn't you actually adhere to tradition? It seems kind of important. But Hunt's Traditional Sauce takes heritage in a slightly less-than-favorable direction by including ingredients that sauce doesn't need to be fantastic, even when it comes from a can. Does it still taste like spaghetti sauce? Yes. Does it adhere to the honest-to-goodness tradition of real Italian sauce as part of the performance? Not really, no. Instead, it takes a contemporary approach that gives a presumably authentic sauce a factory food sucker punch. 

The modern tweak comes in the form of high fructose corn syrup, that gooey guck that shows up just about everywhere these days. Add sugar to spaghetti sauce if you must, but this corn-based extraction represents some of the worst developments in contemporary food science and certainly doesn't belong here. Nobody's asking Hunt's to aim for a deluxe concoction like lemon-garlic pasta sauce, but it isn't too much to expect that the ingredients get a more trustworthy mix-in to bring sweetness to the pot.

Another tiny can with the potential for big success, Hunt's Roasted Garlic Tomato Sauce should be a mini-winner in your kitchen pursuits. Why wouldn't puréed tomatoes mixed with red pepper and salt be a culinary victory for the cook in a hurry? It's the exact assemblage you'd gather if you were making your own sauce. And yet, it fails on the taste scale dramatically, falling so short it's likely the worst can in our collection by far. What could Hunt's have done so differently that puts this can on the "most unwanted" list?

Did you notice something missing in the ingredients run-down — something included in the name but omitted from the formula? That's right, the only mention of garlic in this sauce is in the name. Instead of finding garlic of any sort in the can itself, you'll find natural flavors and ... sesame oil? It's listed there, though whether it's intended to help impart a faux-garlicky zing is up for debate. All you really need to know is that if a sauce called roasted garlic doesn't include any garlic, roasted or otherwise, it's not a sauce worth investing in.

The vibrant yellow label of Cento Sauce Italiano isn't found among the selections of the pasta sauce aisle with the other canned spaghetti sauce; it's hidden in the canned tomato and tomato paste section instead. With a trim list of wholesome ingredients, it appears to be a high-quality offering from a lesser-known brand, but one that provides an expansive catalog of Italian dining enhancements — everything from pesto to clam sauce. The canned concoction is the only product in the line that comes close to being a canned spaghetti sauce, which warrants Cento a spot in the trial, with high hopes for a favored flavor experience.

The truth is that Cento is a brightly acidic, tomato-forward sauce that doesn't have to do too much to be impressive. The label reports dried onion and garlic with other spices and sweet bell pepper, though it seems that the citric acid conducts the show, helping pull the other flavors into the spotlight. Anyone who's ever eaten anything knows that tartness isn't just a taste; it's an experience that can easily overwhelm your tastebuds and drown out anything else in the mix if not balanced properly. Cento's smart sauce stays even-handed and does an admirable job of keeping all the elements in play, conjuring up a canned spaghetti add-on that brings big Italian flavor without weirdness. Buon appetito indeed!

Skipping the step of making your own ground beef for a heartier meat-based spaghetti sauce may sound like a real timesaver. But which is more important, your time or your enjoyment of your dinner? And if your enjoyment includes feeling good about what comes out of a can like Hunt's Meat Sauce, you'd probably like to know that your purchase netted you sauce and meat, with not much else to compete for your adoration. Well, if that's your opinion, this pre-made sauce is a convenience you'd be wise to work around.

What makes this can such a can't in the kitchen? We could start with sugar, an inclusion here that only sometimes makes an appearance in spaghetti sauce. But sugar is forgivable in light of the high fructose corn syrup it shares the label with, an extra sweetener that seems like overkill. By the time we reach the hydrolyzed soy, corn, and wheat proteins — components of alternative proteins found in vegan burgers and plant-based crumbles — it becomes clear that meat isn't the only thing chunking up the contents of the can. In fact, rereading the front of the label, you can find the fine print lists this creation as meat "flavored" instead of simply including meat. It's unsurprising that the finished sauce tastes weird, too. This can gets a hearty thumbs-down.

Anytime vegetables enter the canned sauce equation, things are bound to get a whole lot more flavorful ... right? It seems like a safe assumption, given that you would add veggies to your own homemade sauce, were you in that position. Hunt's Roasted Garlic & Onion Sauce aims for the same bullseye by dropping in two tasty ingredients used to make straight-up tomato sauce into a sturdier concoction for generations.

It's not for lack of trying that Hunt's punts on its sturdier version of spaghetti sauce. The roasted garlic and onion actually bring the flavor up from a simmer to a boil. But what's with the high fructose corn syrup making an unnecessary appearance here, and in addition to sugar once again? If you want that level of sweetener in your pasta, you might as well sprinkle it with Gummy Bears and Sour Punch Straws. Taste-wise, there's a strange chemical essence that competes with the garlic and onions and clearly doesn't belong in spaghetti sauce. If you're looking for a pure pasta topper that restricts the recipe to tomatoes, oil, veggies, and seasonings, this selection should get canned — as in fired (you probably picked up on that).

The market for canned spaghetti sauce is much more constrained than for jarred sauces. Hunt's pretty much runs the game, with Cento providing tomato sauce that can be transformed into a finished sauce with a few extra steps. We looked to the entire Hunt's line to get a vantage of every canned sauce that shoppers might encounter in stores and online, and we found simple tomato sauces in the portfolio that work perfectly fine as a full-bodied spaghetti sauce — sometimes better than the more complex sauces.

Our best and worst designations arose first from the ingredients listed on the label, with purer recipes receiving the "best" seal of approval and concoctions that include seemingly unnecessary add-ins receiving the "worst" stamp of disappointment. The one offending inclusion we found as a common factor in the worst sauces was corn syrup in regular and high fructose forms. Any sauce that worked that goop into the formula received a thumbs down, though straight-up sugar was given a pass, since this is an ingredient that sometimes makes an appearance in homemade sauce recipes and is favorable to corn syrup in any form. We tried them alone and over pasta to see how they fared flavor-wise, then merged the ingredients-plus-flavor aspects into an overall designation.