Our Favorite Store-Bought Steak Sauce Bottles Up Impeccable Flavor

A perfectly seasoned steak doesn't always need a sauce, but sometimes adding a touch of your favorite bottled product can go a long way to perk up a boring cut of beef. So we recently set our brand biases aside and did a blind taste test of 10 steak sauces to see which ones we enjoyed best. Our favorite sauce was one everyone knows and loves, and it shouldn't come as a surprise to many of you. Because if classic A.1. is your favorite steak sauce, it ended up being our blind favorite too, even when competing against a variation on its own brand.

Our taster absolutely loved the flavor. "It isn't too sweet, lends the perfect amount of tanginess, and yields a very subtle peppery taste," she said. She also appreciated that it wasn't too thin either, showing that texture and thickness do matter when it comes to steak sauces. Other brands we tried were either too sweet, had flavors that didn't work well with steak, or just didn't read as steak sauce, such as Heinz 57. And A.1.'s Thick and Hearty variation was strangely neither thick nor hearty, which is part of why the original version was able to claw its way to the top.

Interestingly, A.1. Original Steak Sauce is made with all plant-based products, which means it's technically vegan, though the product isn't labeled as such. And since its intent is to bolster the savory flavor of meat, it may not appeal to the vegan lifestyle. That being said, the stuff boasts a combination of ingredients like tomato puree, vinegar, raisin paste, and crushed orange puree, along with spices and seasonings such as dried onion, dried garlic, and celery seed. Everything works in concert to support the natural umami flavor in bold proteins like steak.

And though it's heavy on the tomato puree, it's really the other ingredients (like vinegar, raisin paste, and orange puree) that turn what could potentially be a ketchup-like substance into something more like a brown sauce (like HP Sauce). The fruits give A.1. Sauce that extra punch of flavor, and the profile is unique when compared to something like Worcestershire sauce — which is made with tamarind. This winning combination is really what brought A.1. Sauce to the top of our blind steak sauce rankings, so apparently it has stood the test of time for a reason. It's just plain good.