The Budget Cocktail Sauce You Need To Leave At The Grocery Store

Cocktail sauce and seafood go together like peanut butter and jelly, or really any two things you adore as a pair. The bite of chilled, sweet, briney seafood dipped generously in tomato-sweet, horseradish-hot, acidic, umami-packed cocktail sauce is an experience to be savored. That is, if your cocktail sauce is good.

While it's crucial for your seafood to be excellent in terms of both taste and food safety, don't let that overshadow the importance of a good sauce. Too watery? Yuck. All one note of too sweet or too acidic? No, thanks. In order to ensure all of your future classic shrimp cocktails are as stellar as you deserve, we tried and ranked seven grocery store cocktail sauces. So allow us to save you from an underwhelming appetizer: Signature Select's cocktail sauce should not make it into your cart.

At just $2.59 for a 12-ounce bottle, it might be tempting to choose this brand at supermarkets like Vons, Albertsons, and Safeway. But sometimes, when something sounds too cheap to be good, it is. This condiment commits both cocktail-sauce crimes: being too thin and too totally tipped toward sweetness. It's made of tomato puree and high fructose corn syrup, which can make the tomato taste feel almost artificial and definitely too sweet. There's distilled white vinegar and horseradish plus onion and garlic powders, but neither the acidity or spice really come through enough to temper that corn syrup sweetness, which means neither flavor will balance sweet-leaning seafood either.

To understand why Signature Select's cocktail sauce falls flat, you just have to consider the ingredients in a good option and see how they compare. Cocktail sauce needs balanced complexity — it needs to be sweet, yes, but that must be accompanied by acid, heat, spice, and umami. Homemade cocktail sauce, for example, calls for ketchup for that sweet tomato taste as well as a fuller mouthfeel, complemented by bright lemon zest and acidic lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce with its own sweet-acidic-umami blend, spicy horseradish, and hot Tabasco sauce, plus salt and pepper.

We can also look at the cocktail sauce that took the number one spot on our ranking, which is from Whole Foods' 365 brand. It boasts a long list of organic ingredients, including tomato puree, horseradish, cane sugar, white vinegar, salt, Worcestershire sauce, onion powder, and garlic powder. It's sweet, acidic, umami-rich, spicy, and heat-packed. It also has a nice thick yet silky smooth consistency, so it will cling to each bite of seafood beautifully. It's $3.29 for a 10-ounce bottle, so at not even a dollar more than the Signature Select, it's definitely worth the difference. Or you can go even horseradish-spicier with our second-best pick, S&F cocktail sauce, which still balances that heat nicely with concentrated tomatoes, water, vinegar, cane sugar, sea salt, garlic, onion, and other spices, plus xanthan gum for thickness. The theme here is balance, and Signature Select, unfortunately, just doesn't have it.