Our Favorite Store-Bought Tartar Sauce Tastes Just Like Homemade

Tartar sauce is a delicious mayonnaise-based condiment packed with briny flavor from pickles and capers, plus other recipe-dependent ingredients such as lemon juice and various herbs. Whipping up a homemade tartar sauce is easy, but why go through even minimal effort when there's a store-bought tartar sauce that tastes just as fresh?

The sauce in question is Vince's, and it's that genuinely fresh taste that makes it so good. Normally, store-bought sauces have some kind of flavor degradation or artificial taste that comes from any combination of preservatives, poor quality or artificial ingredients, and simple age as they sit on shelves. But, when we tried Vince's, we were surprised to find it tasted like we'd just made it ourselves. On top of that, Vince's is packed with many of the best optional tartar sauce ingredients, such as garlic, onion, and lemon juice, that give top-tier tartar sauces their bold, delicious flavor.

While Vince's sauce shot to the top of the ladder for its fresh-from-the-kitchen taste, its delicious acidic elements didn't hurt. Primarily coming from vinegar and lemon juice, the acid helps brighten up and sharpen the otherwise rich sauce. It's also perfectly balanced with the sauce's other flavors, adding a bite behind them without being overpowering.

Those other flavors are surprisingly varied, coming from ingredients both typical and atypical of tartar sauces. Its typical flavors include the brininess of capers, herbal notes of dill, and vinegary crunch of pickles. Its atypical ingredients are much more exciting, including using egg yolk instead of whole eggs, a la kewpie, for richness, umami, and color. There's also some turmeric for more vibrancy.

Vince's also contains high-fructose corn syrup and sugar. Any kind of sugar is abnormal for homemade sauces but is in almost all prepackaged foods since sugar acts as both a preservative and palatability booster. Thankfully, the sugar in Vince's doesn't twist the flavor into too-sweet territory. 

On a smaller note, it's nice that the sauce comes in a screw-top jar rather than a squeeze bottle. Since it's thick, the wide opening makes it much easier to scoop out. That thickness also makes it easy to spread and helps it cling to foods you dip in it.

If you do grab some Vince's tartar sauce, there are plenty of opportunities to use it. As the Vince's jar says on the label, it's perfect for seafood. Fried seafood pairs particularly well with tartar sauce, whether you're dipping fish and chips into it or spreading it across the bread of a fried shrimp and oyster po' boy. It's equally delicious on non-fish sandwiches, especially when using it instead of regular mayo for extra flavor. It's exceptional on the otherwise plain ham and cheese, for example, or for giving some tang to an Italian sub.

Vince's tartar sauce also makes for a wonderful marinade or a great ingredient for one. Mayo is already a secret ingredient to juicy chicken, for instance, so using tartar sauce instead brings in extra flavor on top. Finally, Vince's tartar sauce makes a great base, again instead of regular mayo, for Russian and Thousand Island-inspired dressings, combining the strengths of both to create something wholly unique.