Review: Walden Farms Tomato & Basil Pasta Sauce

Of all the Walden Farms reviews that I've done on this blog, I think my favorite was my review of their Walden Farms Tomato Ketchup.  It wasn't my favorite because it was so good, but instead because it was so awful and it caused me to write a post loaded with vitriol and disdain for the product.  I don't think I've ever hated something as much as I hated that, so I was hoping that this review of the Walden Farms Tomato & Basil Pasta Sauce would save me from thinking that all Walden Farms products modeled after tomato based on products suck.  I picked this one up on sale at my local Kroger for $3.69 and it's twelve ounces, zero calories, sugar free, etc.

Being that it this is a product consisting of tomato sauce and basil, you can't really expect that there would be a whole lot to describe about how it looked and smelled and that is definitely the case.  The sauce is red, like a tomato, so there's a check in the success column.  There were also little flakes of basil in that sauce, so there's another check in the column.  Unfortunately, that's where the checks ended.  The sauce itself was very runny, but I was willing to look past that since sometimes store bought regular sauces are very runny too.  What got me was the smell of this.  It didn't smell like tomatoes or basil, but instead smelled like acidic vinegar.  Ugh.  Not an appealing odor as I headed in for a taste.

That vinegar smell carried over to the taste too because this one tasted like straight vinegar with a very faint tomato aftertaste and an even fainter basil aftertaste.  Being that those are the two namesake flavors in this, you'd expect that they would be prominent, but in the case of this sauce, that was definitely not the case.  Being that this was more acidic vinegar than tomato or basil, I was definitely turned off by it and while not nearly as bad as the ketchup, I can't say this was good either.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Like I said, not as bad as the ketchup, but also not good and this gets a FLY BY IT rating.  One thing I will note is that if you doctor it up with garlic, cheese, etc. so that it masks the actual flavor of the sauce, it becomes tolerable.  It's still not a great flavor though it's not something that I would recommend to anyone.  Too bad, because I usually like Walden Farms products and it always pains me to mark one down in the loss column like I have to mark this one.

FLY BY IT!!