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One of the key staple ingredients vegan cooks need to have is a good jar of pasta sauce — especially the creamy kind. From saving you in a time pinch to elevating many a dish, pasta sauce is a versatile must-have. But for the vegan folks, it may be challenging to find one that’s tasty, even more so if you’re searching for a thicker variety. Without dairy to aid the texture, plant-based sauces are a bit of a gamble. One such example is Primal Kitchen No Dairy Alfredo Sauce, which we found to be the worst in our ranking of eight store-bought vegan creamy pasta sauces. The texture of this sauce is absolutely awful.
It’s so gelatinous that our taste tester actually compared it to the canned Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. It’s also much too thick, and comes with visible chunks rather than being smooth and creamy as one would expect from an Alfredo sauce. The texture doesn’t get any better when the sauce is heated up, either, and some unhappy customers have complained that it totally ruined the dish they poured the sauce over. Our taste tester also found that heating it created an off-putting odor. The odd color of the sauce is yet another red flag — the images online show the sauce as pale white, while its true color is far more gray, noticeably surprising people who ordered the product through an online store.
Primal Kitchen’s acidic flavor profile does not work in an Alfredo sauce
Since Primal Kitchen No Dairy Alfredo Sauce is marketed as being a vegan Alfredo, people who purchased it reasonably expected a somewhat familiar flavor to the buttery Italian version. Instead, they got a mouthful of garlic and citrus — a very tangy flavor profile that had some shoppers questioning whether the sauce was spoiled. This unfortunate flavor makes a lot of sense once we glance at the ingredients, which include roasted garlic, onion powder, lemon juice concentrate, and citric acid; all very sharply flavored, pungent additions — indeed an odd choice considering that classic Alfredo sauce usually tastes mild and gentle.
But despite this sauce being a huge miss, there’s no reason to give up on Primal Kitchen just yet. In fact, the number one creamy sauce pick in our taste test happens to be from this very same brand. We ranked its No Dairy Vodka Sauce Made With Avocado Oil (available on Amazon) as the best creamy pasta sauce. Some of the ingredients are quite similar to the brand’s Alfredo sauce — avocado oil, pumpkin seed butter, onions, garlic, and citric acid — but they simply work so much better in a tomato-based sauce, ultimately making this one a success and the Alfredo one a hard pass.
