I Tried 10 Jars of Alfredo Sauce and Now This Is the Only One I’ll Buy

The majority of restaurants in Italy don’t serve fettuccine Alfredo (shocker, I know), and the ones that do are usually catering to tourists. Or they’re somehow connected to Alfredo di Lielo, a restaurant owner whose name is synonymous with a sauce that isn’t exactly what he “created” more than a century ago. 

According to the sauce’s origin story, di Lielo kept whipping up plates of buttered pasta for his pregnant wife to help with her ongoing morning sickness. The simple combination of pasta, butter, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese did the trick, and she encouraged him to put it on the menu of his joint in Rome — despite the fact that buttered noodles are so basic that, well, you wouldn’t necessarily go to a restaurant to eat it. 

A writer for the Saturday Evening Post also ate at Alfredo’s and he couldn’t stop talking about it in his columns. But in the following years when curious American cooks eventually tried recreating the sauce, their comparatively bland versions of butter and cheese lacked the richness of what Alfredo made in Rome. That led to the addition of heavy cream, and ultimately, the creation of the “Alfredo” sauce that has become a standard “Italian” dish in the good ol’ United States. 

Alfredo sauce has since also become a staple on grocery store shelves, and there are literally dozens of pre-made versions at your perusal in the aisles. Given the sheer quantity, I needed to find the best jarred Alfredo sauce you can buy, so I tested them out for you. 

For the purest form of the sauce (if we can really call is that), I shopped for just Alfredo sauces — no roasted garlic versions, no pesto alfredo, nothing. I ended up with 10 jars and all of them were purchased from a supermarket, a big-box retailer, and two specialty-ish grocery stores (read: they’re all easy to get throughout the country).

Next, I made 10 tiny portions of fettuccine Alfredo and made notes as I ate all of them. A lot of the sauces were just too … something. They were either too heavy, too clumpy, too “mass-manufactured” tasting, or too wrong. And one tasted almost exactly like white sausage gravy, which was both surprising and terrifying. 

But my two favorites? They had the lightest (read: the least overpowering) flavors that tasted like how I’d imagine di Lielo would’ve made it.

Before I get into my top choice, the runner-up was Little Italy in the Bronx Alfredo Sauce, which had a delicate hint of garlic that complemented its robust Parm-Regg flavor. It’s not a garlic-forward sauce and is still considered good ol’ Alfredo.

But my favorite was Rao’s Alfredo Sauce, which had a real depth to its flavor, perhaps because it uses a blend of Parmesan and Romano cheeses. (And yes, Rao’s was also my top choice when it came to jarred marinara sauce.) I could taste the cream, butter, and cheese, which were rich but not over-the-top like some of the other jars in the taste test. Just like with the Rao’s marinara sauce, it took every bit of willpower to not eat the stuff with a spoon as if it were a heaping bowl of soup. (It can’t be that much worse for you than, say, a bowl of chowder, right?)

As for the Alfredo, he sold his original restaurant on Via della Scrofa in Rome to his son, who then sold it to a pair of the restaurant’s waiters. Four years later, he opened a new restaurant in Piazza Augusto Imperator and called it Il Vero Alfredo (The Real Alfredo). Both restaurants are still open, and yes, Alfredo’s grandson still serves that signature pasta at Il Vero Alfredo. But if you go, don’t you dare ask if they’re going to put cream in it. 

Do you have a favorite brand of jarred Alfredo sauce? Tell us about it in the comments below.