Organic Sauces, Vinegars and Condiments

The word sauce covers only part of this shelf at 4ecoshop, which also holds wine vinegars, mustards, horseradish and tomato concentrate. Most of it goes into the pan halfway through cooking, not onto the plate at the end. The organic core comes from Alce Nero and La Bio Idea, while our healthy sauces also cover chilli and dessert options from Allnutrition and BioTechUSA. Read on before your next pasta night and see which jar does which job!

Organic pesto and tomato preserves

Pesto here splits between Alce Nero and Vitaliana. Alce Nero fills 130 g jars with genovese, courgette and dried tomato with pecorino and parmesan. That range gives you a green sauce, a milder vegetable one and a sharper red on the same shelf. Vitaliana adds a basil version and a dried tomato version of its own. What separates two jars of organic pesto is the ingredient list, where the cheese, the oil and the share of basil are declared.

Tomato preserves run from thin to thick, and the difference shows in the pan. Passata comes in a 500 g bottle and in a 350 g version pressed from date tomatoes, with a 200 g jar of tomato sauce with porcini for a quicker supper. Concentrate sits at the other end, at 28 percent from Alce Nero and 30 percent from Bio Food. A thin passata slides off whole grain pasta, while a sauce built on concentrate clings to the ridges.

Wine and fruit vinegars for dressings

A dressing changes with the vinegar you pour into it. Balsamic vinegar of Modena comes in a 500 ml bottle and brings a rounder, sweeter note than the rest of the shelf. La Bio Idea covers organic wine vinegar in red and white, the usual base for a vinaigrette. Alce Nero also bottles an unfiltered apple cider vinegar at 5 percent, and the shelf runs to raspberry and apple vinegars as well.

The raspberry one carries a gluten-free mark on the label, while plainer spirit and apple vinegars from Bio Food handle pickling and everyday kitchen jobs. A sharp vinegar rarely works alone in a dressing. Oil softens it and a pinch of dried herb settles the rest. The Italian blend and the smaller jar of oregano sit in our dried herbs section for exactly that.

Mustards, horseradish and savoury spreads

Mustard splits by heat and by texture. Dary Natury bottles an organic mustard and a honey version, Primavika keeps a mild and a hot one, and Krokus adds a French mustard made without added sugar next to a coarse-grain hot one. Grated horseradish comes from Krokus too, alongside beetroot with horseradish for a cold plate. Their pumpkin paste with tomatoes belongs on bread rather than beside meat.

Not everything among our healthy sauces is a preserve. Allnutrition brings a Thai sweet chilli sauce, a habanero chilli sauce and dessert sauces from its Nutlove and Fitking lines, while BioTechUSA adds table sauces in Caesar, barbecue and thousand island flavours. Terrasana sells a gluten-free red Thai curry paste. If vinegar is something you avoid, look for the Primavika ketchup made without it in our organic ketchup section.

Reading the ingredient list on a sauce

Ingredients are listed in descending order. The first two or three names tell you what you are mostly buying, and a jar that opens with tomatoes is a different product from one that opens with water. Sugar is not always spelled out as sugar. It can show up as a syrup, as concentrated fruit juice or under a name of its own.

The percentage in a concentrate works the same way. It describes density, and 28 percent behaves differently in a pan from 30 percent. A front label saying „no added sugar” tells you only what the producer left out. The sugar that fruit and tomatoes bring with them stays in the jar, which is worth knowing when you compare two sauces without added sugar.