Our Favorite Trader Joe's Sauce Makes Store-Bought Pasta Taste Homemade

Most dedicated Trader Joe's shoppers have their favorite items. Perhaps it is the chain's popular Garlic Bread Cheese (which just returned to stores for summer 2024) or one of its flavorful TJ's seasoning blends. Here at Tasting Table, we've ranked many of Trader Joe's items, including its variety of jarred pasta sauces. 

In our TJ's pasta sauce ranking, we put 17 of its different sauces to the test including staples like marinara sauce as well as its more unique offerings like Cajun-Style Alfredo Pasta Sauce (hint: this one landed at the bottom of the list). But out of all of the Trader Joe's pasta sauces we tested, the one that took the number one spot was its Organic Vodka Sauce.

Our writer ranked it number one mainly for the flavors it gets from ingredients such as organic tomatoes, heavy cream, Parmesan cheese, garlic, basil, and, obviously, some vodka among a handful of other inclusions. Those organic tomatoes and a little lemon juice give the sauce an ideal acidity. It's also not extremely dairy-forward, and therefore not pink like many other brands of jarred vodka sauce. This makes it a good choice if you don't like an extremely creamy sauce to put on your pasta.

Tasting Table isn't the only outlet that thinks Trader Joe's Organic Vodka Sauce, which is sold in 25-ounce jars, is supreme. The sauce has also made its way onto TJ's rankings at other publications. The fans have good things to say, too. In a Reddit thread on the popular Trader Joe's subreddit, there are many comments in favor of the organic sauce. One Redditor cites it as one of the Trader Joe's items they cannot live without, while another says it's always in their meal rotation. 

You can use TJ's vodka sauce in the same way that you'd use that of another brand or any other type of pasta sauce — but, of course, we've got some ideas. Use it to make our classic penne alla vodka recipe even easier and skip the steps that involve making sauce from scratch. And if penne isn't your thing, consider using bowtie, or farfalle, which is considered the best pasta to pair with vodka sauce. It's also a flavorful sauce to spread on eggplant, add to a sandwich for spice, swap in for tomato sauce in a crispy and saucy chicken Parmesan, or to upgrade your next homemade pizza.