What’s the best jarred alfredo sauce? We rolled up our sleeves and boiled our noodles to find out.
Alfredo sauce warms my (potentially enlarged) heart. It was one of the first things I learned to cook when I started working in Italian-American restaurants as a teenager, and I remember people at school being impressed that I could make it. Girls talked to me. Classmates saw me differently. Suddenly, I had social value. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was one of the cool kids (I was still a giant dork and perpetual virgin), but alfredo was an easy path to street cred—like, really easy. Made with little more than cream, butter, and cheese, the sauce is effortless and delicious, especially when subtle hints of garlic and ground black pepper are there to give it some complexity. Good alfredo should be comforting, sure, but it shouldn’t be bland or boring.
The same goes for a jarred alfredo sauce. For this taste test, we opened up several varieties and dunked rotini into the sauce, almost like chips and dip. We decided that we want our alfredo to be creamy, cheesy, and buttery, with a salty bite and hopefully some nice peppery flavor. Herbs aren’t necessary, but they aren’t unwelcome either. Butter is paramount to good alfredo, and the stuff that ranked highest had a pronounced butter flavor. (After all, actual Roman alfredo is all butter, no cream.) More than anything, we want a jarred alfredo sauce that makes us feel like we’re in a booth at a neighborhood Italian joint with checkered tablecloths and a killer chicken parm on the menu. Go ahead and jar that experience.
Here’s our creamy, dreamy alfredo list.
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- Giovanni Rana Alfredo Sauce
Giovanni Rana is the closest thing to restaurant-quality alfredo on this list. It’s creamy, salty, and buttery, just like we want. Rana uses a combination of Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano cheese, giving this sauce a well-balanced, pungent, salty bite. Parmigiano is great, but Romano is what provides that extra oomph of sharpness. This sauce actually tastes like there’s butter in it, too, instead of just being all cream. Plus, there’s a subtle amount of garlic flavor here that doesn’t upstage the sauce itself. Everything about this alfredo sauce is balanced and delicious. Sporked managing editor Gwynedd Stuart said, “I’m surprised how good this is.” Frankly, we all were. Rana is the clear winner.
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- Little Italy in the Bronx Alfredo
This is another Parmigiano/Romano blend alfredo sauce with a nutty flavor and buttery consistency that we loved. In fact, his one manages to channel how I make alfredo at home: I use cream, yes, but I toss in a ton of butter, too. That butteriness coupled with a peppery bite took me back to my days in a restaurant kitchen. This sauce is a strong choice, it just didn’t quite live up to Rana in terms of overall flavor.
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- Bertolli D’Italia Alfredo
While the other alfredos are thinner and butterier, this one feels like pure, thick cream. “It kind of tastes like cold butter cheese,” Sporked editor-in-chief Justine Sterling said. “It has a nice creamy aftertaste and a little tang.” Bertolli is a bit lemony, which isn’t necessarily a defining characteristic of alfredo sauce, but the added flavor is good nonetheless. Still, the quality of its ingredients didn’t exactly shine through. “It tastes fake, but I don’t hate it,” mused staff writer Jordan Myrick.
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- Classico Creamy Alfredo
Blackened chicken alfredo was a chain-restaurant menu staple in the 1990s, and this sauce would be right at home with peppery slices of breast meat and some over-cooked fettuccine.
It’s pretty much all cream and cheese, but that’s not a horrible thing. This needs a bit of extra flavor, making it a great candidate for some added heat. If sautéing up some blackened chicken is too much trouble, just sprinkle in some crushed red pepper, granulated garlic, and kosher salt, and that’ll liven things up a bit. The truth is, most brands don’t exactly nail the flavor of something homemade outright—that’s where you and your spice rack come in. Classico is totally serviceable if you put in a little work on your end.
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- Whole Foods Market Alfredo Sauce with Roasted Garlic
Yes, roasted garlic has a more subtle taste than, say, freshly minced garlic, but we wanted more of that savory flavor from this alfredo sauce. “You don’t get much garlic here,” said Jordan. “I want to be punched in the face with garlic.” It’s true—the garlic flavor here isn’t super strong, but I’m okay with the mildness of this sauce. Whole Foods uses quality ingredients like Grana Padano and Romano cheeses. Grana Padano is nutty, and when you pair that with the actual nutmeg in the sauce, you get an aromatic, almost woody-tasting cream sauce. It might need a little help seasoning wise, but Whole Foods makes a solid standard alfredo with good ingredients.
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- Rao’s Homemade Alfredo Sauce
Rao’s alfredo is good enough, but it doesn’t exactly live up to their iconic-tasting red sauce. It’s a little brown and nutty, and the flavor is very, very mild. It reads more like a bechamel sauce (think: cream, flour, and butter) than a classic alfredo. Bechamel is great, though, especially added in layers to a rich, hearty meat lasagna, which would be a good use for this sauce, too. Hell, throw this alfredo in a vegetable lasagna or top a veggie pizza with it. I’d dip some crust in this, no doubt. The mildness and quality ingredients make Rao’s a totally safe pick.
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- Legnano Classic Italian Alfredo
I fought hard for this one even though it has its faults, including a lemony flavor that’s bizarre considering there’s no lemon listed in the ingredients. The sharp, acidic bite was a hurdle for most of the tasters, but, if you can get past that, Legano has a lot of other wonderful flavors. First of all, this was the most peppery of the alfredo sauces we tasted. My personal belief is that coarse black pepper wholeheartedly belongs in alfredo, so much so that it’s the fourth most important ingredient for me (behind butter, cream, and cheese). The cheese is really tasty here, and you’ll even see nice little morsels of Grana Pardano floating around the jar. Legano is salty and peppery and cheesy and creamy, but the damn acidity is notched up too high. I still say this is worth a try, but I must defer to the other professional tasters on the Sporked team. Sadly, not everything is about me.
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Best of the Best
Best Buttery
Best Creamy
Best w/ Blackened Chicken
Best Ingredients
Best for Lasagna
Best Lemon Flavor
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Just a tad sad that the classic Ragu brand wasn’t used. It’s a nice, you know what you’re getting, type of sauce. It’s cheesy and creamy, and while not the most robust, complex, or most varied, you know what you’re getting and it hits the spot.
As someone who strongly dislikes pepper, I’m afraid I might disagree with most of these, but I also acknowledge that disliking pepper is weird. What’s the best Alfredo with little to no pepper, I wonder?
Rana doesn’t have pepper in its ingredient list.