Alfredo sauce is a beloved staple at Italian-American restaurants around the nation, normally consisting of a roux-based sauce that’s as cheesy as it is creamy. For pasta lovers in a hurry, jarred Alfredo sauce saves time, ingredients, and effort. We sampled and ranked 14 jarred Alfredo sauces based on creaminess, texture, and overall flavor. The one brand to avoid at the store, however, is the cashew-based Victoria Vegan Alfredo Sauce.
Cashews have long been the secret ingredient behind vegan versions of buttery, rich cheese sauces; not only are they the star ingredient in many of these vegan cheese brands that we ranked, but they’re also the foundation of our own vegan cheese sauce recipe. Blending raw cashews into a sauce culminates in a creamy, off-white color similar to the heavy cream and butter you’d find in a typical Alfredo sauce. Unfortunately, the greyish hue of Victoria vegan Alfredo was the first clue that something about this sauce was off. The second was a cloyingly sour taste that tasted a long way from the nutty, salty parmesan cheese it was supposedly trying to imitate.
Furthermore, with a key item on the bottle’s ingredients list being turbinado sugar, the sauce had an oddly sweet aftertaste, and this type of coarse sugar just didn’t seem to have dissolved. We were left with a gritty finish to an almost slimy consistency that ended up pooling at the bottom of the bowl of pasta instead of coating the noodles themselves.
More negative reviews for Victoria vegan Alfredo sauce
It wasn’t hard to find a wealth of negative reviews to validate our last-place ranking of Victoria Vegan Alfredo Sauce. Customer comments on influenster.com were even more ruthless than we were. One simply said that it “tastes horrible and the texture is even worse.” All negative reviews noted a strangely sour flavor that was impossible to overcome. Some customers recommended doctoring the Alfredo sauce with other spices or even mixing it with tomato sauce, but this defeats the point of a convenient bottled product.
If written reviews aren’t enough, you can see the disappointment on people’s faces in real time with YouTube. One YouTube review called the sauce a generic cheese imposter that’s trying to be cheesy but failing miserably. Another scathing YouTube taste test asked the same question we did: “Why is it sour?” These same reviewers said they wouldn’t feed it to guests, especially if they were trying to convince them to go vegan.
Before you say that this sauce was at an unfair disadvantage when compared to dairy-based counterparts, we have tasted and ranked plenty of delicious vegan creamy pasta sauce brands. It’s no surprise that the Victoria brand appears on our list, and even less of a surprise that it wasn’t too favorably reviewed there either.
