I was quite surprised to see that the tesco value pasta sauce has got such high star ratings, in my experience it is not nice at all.

I bought a couple of jars of tesco value pasta sauce a couple of months ago to go with some fresh tortellini pasta I had bought. The tortellini only needs a small amount of sauce so I didnt want to splash out on an expensive sauce, so when I saw the jars of pasta sauce for only 39p I though that was great deal and I actually bought two jars! The sauce is tomato based and comes in a glass screw top jar, each jar contains 440g of sauce. The sauce is pretty basic and contains mostly tomato, with some herbs and garlic added for extra flavour. The nutritional information per 1/4 jar is:

Calories: 23
Saturated fat: 0.2g
Sugar: 2.4g
Salt: 1.6g

Overall the calorie content is quite low which is good, though the salt and sugar seems a little high to me, though that is a common occurrence with value products, they tend to be less healthy than more expensive varieties.

The sauce is very easy to cook, can just microwave it for a few minutes or cook it on the hob, it is very fast to heat up. Since the sauce comes in a screw top jar you can reseal the jar if you don't use all the sauce and keep it in the fridge for later. The sauce should be consumed within 3 days of opening.

The sauce consistency is medium thickness and smooth. I would prefer a sauce that is a bit thicker with some lumps of veg in it but since this is from the value range I didn't expect it to be the perfect sauce. I guess if you wanted to add extra to the sauce, like bacon or chopped tomatos that would be very easy to do, I just had it on its own. The sauce smells very nice and tomatoy and i used around 1/3 of a jar to go with my tortellini.

The taste of the sauce is quite sweet but also has a tomatoey taste. At first I thought the sauce was pretty good but after a few mouthfuls I began to get a nasty after taste in my mouth, sort of a metallicy kind of bitter taste, kind of hard to describe really. I'd had the tortellini many times before and had never experienced the taste so I assumed the taste was coming from the pasta sauce. I persiveered and finished the meal but I wasn't very impressed with the sauce at all.

Overall I wouldn't recommend this sauce based on my experience, maybe I just had a bad batch as it gets mainly positive reviews from other dooyooers, but I have to say I put the rest of the the jar of sauce and the second jar I bought straight in the bin. I'm always willing to try items from the tesco value range to save a bit of money, some are good, some are not, this certainly goes in the latter category and I won't be buying it again.