Healthy Store Bought Sauces to Easily Bring Meals to Life

The Mediterranean diet focuses on using simple ingredients but uses flavorful ingredients to create dishes that are anything but boring. Sharing some of our favorite, healthy store bought sauces that we use over and over again in our home to flavor meals.

Adding Flavor to Meals – Mediterranean Diet Style

I love that the Mediterranean diet takes simple ingredients and creates delicious, flavorful meals by using sauces, spices, and herbs. Fresh lemon, garlic, capers and dried herbs can really elevate any dish.

While we love trying to cook as much as we can from scratch, there are sometimes when we have to rely on store bought items.

Tips for Finding Healthy Sauces from the Store

There are so many sauces available at the store, it can be quite overwhelming to navigate! Here are some of our tips for finding the right one for you –

• Read the ingredient list, try to pick sauces that don’t have sugar listed as the first ingredient and find out what’s actually being added to the sauce
• Choose olive oil based sauces over heavy creams, milks or excess thickening agents
• The less amount of artificial flavors and preservatives the better
• Look for actual foods rather than a long list of manufactured foods

Our Favorite Healthy Store Bought Sauces

These are just a few of our currently sauces to buy at the store, along with a few ways we like to enjoy them.

Primal Kitchen Dressings

I love these salad dressings because they are avocado oil based and dairy free, gluten free and don’t contain any added sugars. Each one is extremely flavorful and is great as a dressing or even a marinade.

So far we’ve tried the following flavors –

• Caesar – excellent on salad or used as a marinated for chicken
• Green Goddess – this is one of my favorites. It’s bright, flavorful and is great as a veggie dip or on salad
• Ranch – not as thick as typically ranch dressing but equally flavorful. Love using on salad or a dip for crudite

Vegan Kale, Cashew, Basil Pesto (from Trader Joe’s)

A longtime favorite, this pesto is great on pasta, fish, veggies, and even hardboiled eggs. The ingredients are also great – kale, olive oil, cashew butter, garlic, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

A great sauce to have on hand in the fridge to toss into last minute meals.

Tzatziki

A classic Mediterranean sauce, tzatziki is so versatile and can be used in many dishes or as a dip for veggies, crackers, pita and more.

It’s actually quite simple to make your own Homemade Tzatziki Sauce but sometimes you just can’t and need to buy it at the store.

This Haig’s Brand is one of our favorites because it has good ingredients like greek yogurt, cucumbers, dill and red wine vinegar.

Bitchin’ Sauce

Or “B-Word Sauce” as my daughter likes to call it. This sauce is fantastic! There are many different flavors but the chipotle is a favorite.

In fact, it’s the star of the show in these Spicy Breakfast Tacos.

It’s an almond based sauce that also has lemon juice, nutritional yeast, chipotle and spices.

Chimichurri Sauce (from Trader Joe’s)

I feel like a broken record with this one but it’s just so good! We put it on these Easy Roasted Sweet Potatoes, scrambled eggs, steak, fish and veggies.

It’s great to have on hand to mix into meals for easy and fresh flavor.

Recipes Using Our Favorite Healthy Store Bought Sauces

These are a few examples of actual recipes we make using these sauces –

• Spicy Breakfast Tacos
• Easy Roasted Sweet Potatoes
• Quick Snack Idea
• Roasted Corn Salad
• Deliciously Easy Grilled Corn on the Cob