Store-Bought Vodka Sauces Ranked Worst To Best

When it comes to store-bought pasta sauces, most of your options are variations of a red sauce — tomato-based sauces that include anything from herbs, mushrooms, meat, cheeses, peppers, or roasted garlic. In a much smaller variety are the white sauces — dairy-based Alfredo sauces, heavy with cream and Parmesan, that occasionally branch out with notes of garlic, truffles, Pecorino and pepper, and even cheddar cheese. But there's a third, much smaller (and dare I say, more exclusive) category of pasta sauces that blend the two: the rosa, or pink pasta sauces, which is where you'll find the vodka sauce.

Vodka pasta sauces universally include tomatoes, vodka, and cream, which are the foundational ingredients I used to judge each sauce, in addition to my experience tasting them. From there, most sauces typically include a combination of onions, garlic, herbs, olive oil, and pepper. It's also customary to add a grated Italian hard cheese like Parmesan or Romano to the sauce once it's finished cooking.

Creating a pink sauce can be tricky. Adding a heavy-fat cream to a hot and acidic red sauce with a hefty splash of vodka is an undeniably delicious thing, but it can quickly lead to a broken sauce if cooked incorrectly or in the wrong proportions. Furthermore, making it shelf-stable enough to jar and sell is also tricky, thanks to the fresh dairy. But many pasta sauce brands have taken on the challenge, and I set out to find which store-bought vodka sauces manage to do it well.

Looking at the ingredients list of Cucina Antica's La Vodka pasta sauce, you'd think this sauce was perfect. It's made with Italian chopped tomatoes, heavy cream, fresh onion, Pecorino Romano cheese, olive oil, salt, vodka, basil, white and black pepper, and a little citric acid — all straightforward, recognizable, and authentic vodka sauce ingredients. Which is why it's so bizarre that the La Vodka sauce doesn't taste like any other vodka sauce in this entire lineup.

Straight out of the jar, the sauce is very fluid, like the tomatoes used in the sauce weren't cooked long enough to lose any of their excess water. It's smooth, but there's still a discernable tomato pulp texture. The smell is inviting, with aromas of tomatoes, herbs, and cheese, and even the orange-pink color is right. But the sauce is so watery that the only breakout flavors are the sweetness of the tomatoes, followed by the cheesy ping from the Pecorino Romano. There's nearly no acidity, and the sauce itself is likely to slide right off of any pasta you serve it with and pool at the bottom of your plate.

Cucina Antica was the most expensive vodka sauce I purchased for this tasting, costing me $10.19 at my local grocery store. As far as high-end sauces go, that wasn't especially surprising, and those who tend to shop for more expensive sauces know they will eventually go on sale. Unfortunately, even with quality ingredients, the price doesn't reflect the flavor of the sauce.

I grew up eating exclusively Prego Traditional pasta sauce over spaghetti, so thanks to nostalgia, I still have a soft spot for the brand (although I've branched out to several other brands and flavors since childhood). This was my first time trying Prego's Creamy Vodka sauce, a flavor many consider to be one of Prego's best pasta sauces — which is saying a lot, considering there are currently an impressive 29 flavors and variations in Prego's collection of Classic Italian Sauces, not including the additional four Alfredo, two pizza, and four pesto sauces the brand makes.

The thing about Prego sauces, including this one, is that they all have an unmistakable Prego-ness about them. If you're familiar with the brand in general, you can probably pick a Prego sauce out of a lineup, blindfolded, regardless of the flavor — and that was absolutely the case with the Creamy Vodka sauce. The brand's sauces are distinctly sweeter than other sauces, go hard on both the Italian herbs and acid notes to match the higher level of sweetness, and are puréed until mostly smooth (but not liquified).

The sauce includes additional sugar, which most other sauces do not, along with cream, vodka, and ricotta cheese, which certainly sets it apart from the crowd. Next to other red Prego sauces, the Creamy Vodka sauce might actually be creamier and zingier, but in a lineup of vodka sauces the sweetness is too much to ignore, ultimately making it just taste like another Prego red sauce.

The Victoria vodka sauce label boasts "100% Imported Italian Tomatoes," followed by "Imported Olive Oil, Fresh Garlic, Basil & Onions, Parmesan, Romano Cheese, Vodka," so it wasn't entirely a surprise that this wound up being one of the more expensive sauces on the list at $9.69 for a 24-ounce jar. Interestingly enough, the one thing this sauce doesn't include is cream (imported or domestic). Instead, it supplements the sauce with whey protein concentrate in an attempt to achieve that familiar vodka sauce creaminess.

In lieu of the rich and smooth creaminess you'd expect, the Victoria vodka sauce has a subtle but noticeable grain to it — much like you'd get from adding whey protein powder to a smoothie — that sits on the tongue regardless of how well blended the sauce is. Once you taste it, it's hard to ignore. In addition to the flavor it imparts, the whey protein concentrate is likely used to help stabilize the sauce.

There's also a somewhat meaty flavor that's harder to attribute to any particular ingredient. After repeatedly tasting the sauce and walking away from it to try and place the flavor, I realized that it tasted vaguely like a chicken parmesan sandwich in sauce form. Depending on your affinity for chicken parm heroes and what you plan on enjoying this sauce on, that might make this sauce more appealing to you. But generally speaking, the grainy texture and meaty flavor aren't worth the hype of all the imported ingredients and inflated price tag.

Trader Joe's churns out as many pasta sauce flavors as the major brands, if not more, to a hungry and loyal shopping audience. There are a handful of sauces you'll always find on the shelves and a few seasonal flavors that rotate in and out. Then there are a few flavors that pop up whenever and wherever they please and sometimes leave just as mysteriously — and the Organic Vodka Sauce is one of those.

Hailed as one of the best pasta sauces at Trader Joe's, I had high hopes for this vodka sauce. The all-organic ingredients include heavy cream and whey, onion, Parmesan cheese, olive oil, garlic purée, lemon juice, basil, vodka, and oregano. Texturally, the sauce lands in the middle of the road, not too loose or thick, with well-defined medium-dice tomato chunks. The chunky tomato pieces are a little firmer than I expected, making them stand out from the rest of the sauce. And while the vodka sauce isn't especially creamy (curious, given both the cream and whey content), it's plenty acidic and bright to the point of leaning bitter at the back of your throat.

In true Trader Joe's fashion, the Organic Vodka Sauce might not be in stock in every location. Even if it is a sauce your local store carries, it might not be listed online, and it could run out quickly, given how popular it is. But if you do find it, the $3.49 price tag is hard to compete with.

What began in 1896 as a small family-owned Italian restaurant on 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue in New York City has become a household name with the expansion of the restaurant's famous line of pasta sauces in grocery stores and wholesalers nationwide. Rao's currently offers 34 pasta, pizza, and pesto sauces, including a vodka sauce, which is typically available in grocery stores. (There is also a Spicy Vodka Arrabbiata sauce available online, which I didn't taste for this review.)

The first thing I noticed about this sauce is how different the texture is from any of the other vodka sauces I tried. It's relatively fluid, but the tomato chunks suspended in the sauce are large and rustic, almost as if they were squeezed by hand and tossed into the sauce without any additional blending. It's not hard to see why it's such a popular store-bought brand with homemade appeal. And while this sauce has almost everything else going for it — Parmesan and Romano cheeses, plenty of herbs and spices, strong and fresh-tasting tomatoes, vodka — the one thing it's missing is the cream.

Once again, whey has been added to the sauce to lend some additional dairy flavor and stability, but it just doesn't provide the same richness I'd expect from an authentic vodka sauce. Luckily, the whey doesn't impart a noticeable grainy texture to this sauce, the flavors are balanced (even if cream isn't one of them), and the ingredients really do make for an appealing sauce.

If you prefer a cream sauce with a hit of tomato in it (as opposed to a tomato sauce with a splash of cream in it), then this is absolutely the sauce for you. Up to this point, most of the sauces have leaned more towards red sauces with little to no cream elements, but Bertolli is here to flip the script. Frankly, if I wasn't striving for a reasonable level of objective balance, my cream sauce-loving heart would have put Bertolli's vodka sauce at the very top of this list and called it a day. But the truth is, this level of creaminess is probably a little too much, even for a vodka sauce.

It's clear before ever even opening the jar what you're getting yourself into here. The tomato-based sauce takes on the signature orangey color of a sauce that's been married with a generous amount of cream and cheese that many vodka sauce lovers will instantly recognize. Warmed and tossed with freshly cooked penne, this vodka sauce has enough richness that I didn't even feel like it needed more Parmesan cheese on top (but don't let that stop you from piling it on).

Even though vodka is relatively high on the ingredients list, it's hard to compete with the richness of this sauce, and much of the tomatoes' acidity and warmth of the vodka has taken a back seat to the dairy. But at the wickedly low price of $2.99 on sale, I'm stocking up anyway.

I tasted the Classico vodka sauce alongside Prego's Creamy Vodka sauce and the Bertolli vodka sauce, since all three brands are available at grocery stores everywhere and are on the lower end of the price spectrum. While Prego's Creamy Vodka sauce didn't take a very strong stride into the vodka sauce arena, and Bertolli's sauce dove a little too far into the cream sauce deep end, Classico's vodka sauce was a welcome entry that brought some much-needed balance back to the field.

The sauce is notably lighter than a traditional red sauce, and the scent of cheese mingles with herbs and tomatoes the moment you open the jar. While it includes cream, Parmesan cheese, milk, and butter, the general creaminess of this sauce keeps itself in check with the tomato and herb flavors of the sauce. Texturally, it's a little thicker than most of the sauces up to this point in the ranking, but it's well-blended and mostly smooth.

Vodka is listed about halfway up the ingredient list, but there isn't a strong vodka aroma or warmth to this sauce. Instead, it seems to have done the work of marrying all of the other flavors happening here and then faded into the background. If you're looking for a reasonably priced vodka sauce (I purchased a 24-ounce jar for $5.99) that will work with just about any pasta shape, and likely appeal in texture and flavor to anyone you serve it to, Classico is a great place to start.

I fully understand how difficult it is to make a shelf-stable vodka sauce that contains real cream without sacrificing quality and flavor or adding unappealing stabilizers. But that's also the entire point of buying a vodka sauce for many home cooks — the opportunity to enjoy a sauce that can sometimes be difficult to make while also being cost-effective — and Carbone's Classic and Spicy Vodka sauces are neither convenient nor cost-effective.

For both the classic and spicy versions, you must also purchase heavy cream and butter (in this economy?!) to finish the sauces yourself, hopefully without it breaking. If you get the Classic Vodka Sauce, you're paying for branding and overpriced marinara with an undetectable trace of vodka. But if you get Carbone's Spicy Vodka Sauce, now you're paying for something you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

The Spicy Vodka sauce is essentially the same as the classic but includes Calabrian Pepper Spread (Peppers, Sunflower Oil, Vinegar, Salt). And this is where the vodka really does its magic. Vodka is incredible at infusing flavors, and here it pulls out the rich flavors of the Calabrian peppers and marries them so beautifully with the rest of the sauce, that all of my rage over how inconvenient this sauce is vanishes. I would happily eat this sauce straight from the jar without bothering with the cream and butter additions. But for the sake of testing, I did, and it's just as great as Rihanna says it is.

At first glance, the Whole Foods brand Organic Creamy Vodka pasta sauce looks a lot like Trader Joe's Organic Vodka pasta sauce, and for a moment before tasting it, I wondered if they might secretly be the same. They look nearly the same in color and texture, with a medium-loose sauce and mid-size tomato chunks. There's an appealing Italian herb aroma that lifts from the jar when you remove the lid, and they're both packaged in similarly shaped jars, but that's about as far as the similarities go.

Whole Foods includes heavy cream, Parmesan, and Romano cheeses in this sauce like several of the other brands in this lineup do, but this is the first sauce to have a more pronounced vodka taste that shines through the stronger tomato, cream, and herbs. I also like that the mid-size tomato chunks in this sauce have the softer texture you'd expect from gently cooked tomatoes, unlike the pieces in the Trader Joe's sauce, which were inexplicably firm.

The noticeably warm flavor of the vodka was a welcome surprise from this relatively low-priced jar of sauce, which only cost me $3.99. Having the extra vodka to burn seems like it might come in handy when reheating this sauce to help develop the flavors further with your meal, especially if you're the kind of person who likes to adapt sauces in the pan at home. Not to mention that it's practically always in stock, which is unfortunately not the case elsewhere.

I'll admit that Botticelli isn't a brand I reach for often when grabbing a red sauce at the grocery store; I'm more inclined to pick up the brand's Garlic Alfredo sauce. But a bottle of Botticelli's Alla Vodka pasta sauce was available at several grocery stores I visited for $8.49 a bottle, earning itself a spot in this tasting, and we're all lucky it did. Vodka sauce lovers across the board are going to enjoy this sauce, whether they're into it for the bright and tangy tomatoes, the smooth cream notes that enrich the sauce, the pops of cheese, or the pepper and oregano that play a supporting role in pulling it all together.

The texture of the sauce is on the thicker side, and the tomatoes themselves have been blended well, but not puréed or entirely liquified. The orangey-pink color of the sauce lets you know that it's got a generous amount of cream in it, but visible pieces of herbs and red tomatoes remind you that this isn't a one-sided sauce. While it wasn't especially important to me that the best vodka sauces be made in Italy or with strictly Italian ingredients, it turns out that Botticelli's Alla Vodka sauce is made in Italy, with Italian tomatoes from Parma, in the Emilia-Romagna region. Italian food lovers will recognize Emilia-Romagna as one of the predominant culinary regions in Italy, offering some of the world's finest cheeses, meats, produce, and of course — pasta.

When choosing vodka sauces for this lineup, the first consideration was that the sauce was widely available in grocery stores — passing on smaller brands that might be equally delicious, but otherwise inaccessible to a majority of readers. Price wasn't initially a factor when choosing candidates, but became a consideration when comparing a sauce's value to other brands, based on what else it had to offer. I looked for a range of store brands, restaurant offerings, big and smaller-name food manufacturers, and both international and domestic sauces to add as much variety to the mix as possible.

There's always a level of personal bias when it comes to tasting, especially foods that fall into comfort food categories like rich and creamy pasta sauces. To help balance personal bias, I polled chef friends and colleagues for their opinions on differences in the sauces, as well as their personal preferences and experiences — and made them taste the competition when the calls were close. I also relied on my own experience, cooking my way through several of New York City's best Italian and Emilia-Romagnaian restaurants, and what I'd be most excited to eat after a long day of work.

Each sauce was tasted on its own, side-by-side with each of the other sauces and several times over, to gather first impressions and help flesh out any subtle variations in the sauces. And then, because I got hungry, I tasted them all over freshly-cooked penne pasta, for the full penne alla vodka experience.