Reviews you can trust.

See why.

The Best Worcestershire Sauce

We tasted four nationally available bottled Worcestershire sauces to find one with bold, balanced flavor.

By

Published June 1, 2016.

The Best Worcestershire Sauce
UpdateNovember 2016
We recently learned French's made changes to the ingredients and recipe of their Worcestershire sauce. We tried the new product, and while tasters noticed that it is lighter in color and less spicy than the old French's, we still preferred Lea & Perrins and our results stand as is.
See Everything We Tested

What You Need To Know

We use Worcestershire sauce to add salty, punchy kick and depth to all sorts of dishes. This ingredient originated in the English county of Worcester in the early 19th century. As the story goes, a wealthy Brit who had recently returned from India commissioned chemists John Lea and William Perrins to create a sauce reminiscent of those he’d enjoyed abroad. Lea and Perrins made the sauce to his specifications but found it unpalatable, so it sat, forgotten, in a corner of their shop’s basement until someone decided to try it a few years later and discovered that fermentation had transformed it into a sauce with incredible depth.

While no manufacturer wants to give up its exact recipe, most Worcestershire sauce today is made with onions, garlic, salt, anchovies, vinegar, spices, tamarind, molasses, and sugar. The sauce is aged for a few weeks to a few months before being strained, diluted with water, and bottled. To find the best version, we rounded up four nationally available Worcestershire sauces and sampled them plain, in barbecue sauce, and in a grilled steak recipe that uses a full cup in the marinade.

Texture wasn’t important in our findings, but flavor certainly was. Two manufacturers made their sauces vegan by omitting anchovies and substituting ingredients like onion oil, mushrooms, and soy sauce. Unfortunately, these sauces didn’t quite match the subtle meatiness and depth of Worcestershire made with anchovies. Tasters also singled out one of the vegan sauces for its overly pungent notes of onion (from the addition of onion oil) when sampled plain and in the steak. We preferred sauces that were balanced, without any one ingredient being too assertive.

Vegan products also tried to compensate by jacking up the sodium: One sauce contained 130 milligrams of sodium per 1-teaspoon serving—twice as much as the 65 milligrams in our top-ranked sauces. Products with moderate saltiness allowed us better control over the final flavor of the dish. That said, these flaws of balance and salinity didn’t matter when we tasted the sauces in barbecue sauce, a recipe that contains a lot of potent ingredients—if you need only a few teaspoons of Worcestershire for a pungent recipe, it’s likely any product will do.

Overall, tasters preferred Lea & Perrins Original Worcestershire Sauce for its bright, balanced flavor; incredible depth; and subtle kick of heat. It’s no wonder this product has stuck around for almost 200 years.

Everything We Tested

*All products reviewed by America’s Test Kitchen are independently chosen, researched, and reviewed by our editors. We buy products for testing at retail locations and do not accept unsolicited samples for testing. We list suggested sources for recommended products as a convenience to our readers but do not endorse specific retailers. When you choose to purchase our editorial recommendations from the links we provide, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices are subject to change.

Reviews you can trust

The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing.

0 Comments