The best supermarket tartare sauce, tried and tasted
Apparently tartare sauce is ready for a rebrand. Heinz, which withdrew its tartare sauce in 2002, launched a Fish & Chips Sauce this year which the company is touting as 'tartare 2... the new must-have for fish dinners.'
I'm not sure I need an upgrade on tartare 1.0, thank you. The chunky condiment, known as tartar sauce (no 'e') on the other side of the Atlantic, is sauce qua non with fish, especially fried fish. But it's brilliant with chicken too, and was originally an accompaniment for steak tartar (which never has an 'e').
A proper tartare sauce has a creamy base, generally mayonnaise, although a few of the more expensive readymade versions add cream. Then it needs a feisty, vinaigery crunch, achieved with chopped gherkins, capers, shallots and herbs – the classic is fine herbes, parsley with some or all of chervil, tarragon and chives, although most of the commercially available sauces I tried for the taste test below featured just parsley. The exceptions are the M&S Collection version, which has untraditional but delicious dill, and Heinz which contains dill and parsley, though you'd never know from the flavour.
Of course, you could easily make your own, especially if you use ready-made mayonnaise, just stirring in the other components. It will, however, require buying jars, packets and bunches of those ingredients, and using only a small amount. That's a big cost up front: a back-of-envelope calculation, and including only parsley in the way of herbs, came to just shy of £7, while a jar of ready-made costs from 65p to £2.60.
But can the ready-made sauces measure up to homemade? Generally not, when it comes to ingredients that nudge them into ultra-processed food (UPF) territory.
Of the 18 sauces I tried, most were 'shelf stable', or ambient: in jars that sit happily at room temperature until they have been opened, at which point they need to live in the fridge. All of them contain stabilisers, such as xanthan gum or guar gum, or even modified starch, which does the same job of holding the water in the emulsion. All but three contain preservatives, usually potassium sorbate.
Heinz, M&S Collection and Waitrose Essential manage without preservatives at least, which goes to show what is possible. But bear in mind that using ready-made mayo to make homemade tartare sauce will almost certainly add a few industrial ingredients to the mix, such as the antioxidant, flavourings and paprika extract in Hellmann's.
If making your own mayo feels like a step too far, but you want to avoid weird additives, there is an alternative, at a surprisingly reasonable price. M&S, Waitrose and Sainsbury's all sell chilled tartare sauce (although M&S's version wasn't available when I was testing). None of them have any untoward ingredients, and both the ones I tried taste much closer to what you might make at home. Better still, they are no more expensive than the top-end jars. That's the sauce.
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How we tasted
All the tartare sauce was brought to room temperature. While I was out of the room, my lovely assistant (AKA my husband) then dolloped them into individual containers and labelled them A-N to anonymise them. At this point I was allowed back into the room to taste the sauces. After I had judged the sauces for flavour and texture, the identity of each sauce was revealed and I examined the ingredients and nutrition, while also looking at price, in order to assess their value.
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