Every week, the Sporked team sidles up to the tasting table and sets out to find the absolute best of the best packaged foods, the gold hidden in the grocery aisles. Each week we’ll bring you five standouts that truly rocked our taste buds and changed our lives—or at least our buying habits. Here are the best things we ate this week.
- Social Hour Harvest Whiskey Sour
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If you’ve tasted a lot of canned cocktails, you’re aware that they aren’t all created equal. Social Hour Harvest Whiskey Sour is built different. It tastes like the best apple cider mixed with a whiskey sour you’d order at a bar. It’s perfectly spiced and bright. We will definitely be drinking more of these this fall.
- Western Hearth Jewish Rye Bread
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Western Harth makes a great rye bread. It’s so soft and it has just the right amount of caraway seeds. Something unique that we loved is that it has a cornmeal coating around the bottom half of the loaf that contributes an incredible texture, especially given how squishy the bread itself is. Your Reubens are about to be next-level.
- Priano Rosso Pesto
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Aldi does it again! Not only is this nutty, cheesy, sun-dried tomato pesto delicious, it’s also cheap ($1.99 a jar!). It’s sweet, savory, and so complex. Sporked editor-in-chief Justine Sterling said it’s like “if you mixed pesto with a splash of marinara so the tomatoey-ness tempers the garlic and salt.” This stuff would be great on pasta, obviously, but, wow, would this be an amazing spread for a sandwich on ciabatta.
- Lamb Weston Golden Supreme Mashed Potatoes
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Lamb Weston knows knows potatoes. They make some of the best french fries we’ve ever tasted, and we can now confidently say that they make some of the best store bought mashed potatoes as well. These bagged, frozen mashed potatoes are easy to make and perfectly seasoned. Our favorite part is that they’re unbelievably creamy. These will be on our holiday tables this year.
- Hormel Cup N’ Crisp Pepperoni
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If you want to make a New York-style pizza, buy this pepperoni. They’re exactly like the pepperoni you’ll find on slices in any NYC joint. They’re nice and oily in a classic pizza shop way and they actually form into little cups when you cook them! These will make you feel like you’re on vacation in the Big Apple without leaving your house.
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!