Review of Ragu Organic Garden Veggie Pasta Sauce

Since my family started eating healthier six weeks ago and trying to go mostly organic, I was excited to find Ragú Organic Garden Veggie Pasta Sauce. I paid $1.88 for a 1 pound 10 ounce jar that touted that there was a full serving of veggies in every ½ cup of sauce. Since organic foods can be pricey, I jumped at the chance to try this sauce.

Once I got home, I looked over the ingredients: organic tomato puree, organic onion puree, organic sugar, organic soybean oil, organic celery puree, organic bell pepper puree, organic carrot puree, sea salt, organic garlic, organic parsley, citric acid, organic basil, and organic fennel. For the price, this sounded okay to me. It was labeled "certified organic" and that's all I was concerned with, initially.

I cracked open the lid and poured it into some browned organic ground beef. Wow! My first impression of the sauce was that it was extremely thin and runny. If I had not had ground beef in this, it would have been more like a thickened juice. I had to simmer it for a while to get it to become somewhat the consistency of sauce. I was not overly pleased with this first impression.

Once my pasta was prepared, I was dismayed to see that simply putting the sauce on top of a pile of spaghetti was not going to work out right. So I drained the spaghetti and dumped it all into the sauce so that it might soak up some of the juices and thicken it. Even after letting it sit for a while with hungry children hovering over me, it still was quite runny and did not stick inside the mass of pasta well. When serving the spaghetti, I found that most of the sauce stayed in the pan and drained out of the noodles.

I will be honest; the taste of this sauce was "acceptable." It filled everyone up and the kids seemed pleased with the taste. This could have been because the third ingredient in this Ragú Organic Garden Veggie Pasta Sauce was sugar. Organic or not, this is not overly healthy. I examined the nutritional information and found that ½ cup serving (if you can get it out of the pan) has 8 grams of sugar. That's a lot of sugar for only 4 ounces of sauce. You can tell immediately that it has too much sugar because it is super sweet.

My husband commented that it tasted overwhelmingly of bell peppers. If a person were very fond of bell peppers, then this sauce would be pleasantly surprising in that way. However, my husband does not care for a large amount of this taste and was not overly satisfied with the flavor.

Overall, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would have to give Ragú Organic Garden Veggie Pasta Sauce a 4. It is simply "okay" and has too much sugar and not enough consistency. I would like to see Ragú come up with a thicker version with chunks of veggies in it. Since this sauce was made from all pureed ingredients, it was thin and unsatisfying. I will not be purchasing Ragú Organic Garden Veggie Pasta Sauce again.