Innestyle Sauce - Classic product reviews

What a lovely surprise this Innestyle Sauce Classic flavour was to enjoy for dinner. When opening the easy to open pouch I was gifted with a pleasant amour of red wine. This smell took me back to a delish lamb shank memory, which was not what I was expecting. When I looked at the sauce through the clear pouch I assumed the sauce would be more of a tomato based sauce with a strong tomato flavour. The red wine hit was least expected but I rather liked it. I wish I had of known this prior though as I would have used the sauce differently with slow cooked meat instead, like a casserole style dish.

I used this classic flavours Innestyle sauce for a yummy mince and pasta dish. One of my sonā ™s favourite meals to eat and he always eat it all up. I half cooked the mince and added the sauce; it was easy to pour out of the bag and no mess, no fuss and no waste. I found the sauce was a great amount to use for the dish as the pasta can often dry out if you do not use enough sauce. So this 500ml pouch was the prefect size for the meal. For the price of this 500ml pouch though I would like it was a little steep. Even though the flavours are amazing, when you think about most tinned sauces they range from about $2 and up. For $10.00 I am not sure if I would buy this for a weekly meal.

Flavour wise this sauce is great and the whole family really enjoyed it and raved about the flavours and the different style of taste it brought to the meal. Turning something so simple into a lovely, yet quick and easy meal. I would suggest the company put example of what you would use the sauce for and with. Matches well with what meats and style of meals as it is an amazing sauce but I would think maybe it may not be used to its full potential due it coming across more of a tomato style sauce.

We love our pasta's they are quick, yummy and you can add tonnes of vegetables without the girls knowing. Having hectic social activities a majority of the week, pastas are always on the menu and the whole family adores them. When the opportunity arose to trial something that I could just add to the mince and spaghetti I jumped at the chance. I usually add plenty of garlic, tin tomatoes, spinach, carrots and lots of flavour in my sauce but as this was complete I just went for the basic adding nothing extra besides onions, cheese and sour cream.

The packet doesn't give much away except for what ingredients are in it. The cover is nice and bright and I really expected it to be more of a tomato base going by the picture. Opening the pouch was nice and easy and ripped perfectly fine. I was surprised when I smelt it as was hit with quite a strong wine smell and that had me a tad confused. I added it to my plain mince and onion mixture and stirred it in for a couple of minutes. It blended in perfectly and I was glad there were no lumpy areas where the sauce did not mix properly.

As I had said above I was expecting this to be more tomato based and honestly I was expecting it to be rather bland but it was anything but. I definitely was surprised after having my first bite as it had more of a kick to it then I was expecting and it did have more of a winery taste to it. I had gone with a Parmesan Cheese which in retrospect was not a great combination as the sauce was rather sweet and the cheese was rather tangy and together they made an unusual combination. At times I would get mouthfuls of just the sauce and next minute I would get a completely different taste so in future I will use a very mild cheese.

It was still a hit with my husband and eldest daughter who both went back for seconds. My youngest took a long time and kept complaining that she did not like the sauce and could we wash it off for her. But after adding more sour cream she quietly ate it. I on the other hand enjoyed it but I am unsure if I would buy it again. I did like how simple it is to just add to the spaghetti and mince and dinner is done but I prefer more of a garlic base. I am very keen to try the other variety but the price is still a huge issue for me when you still have to consider the other ingredients required to make the meal. I like the simplicity of it all - but maybe if it was around the $8 range I would definitely consider purchasing it again.

My family have pasta sauce a couple of times a week so I was keen to try a different brand. Innestyle Sauce Co had three varieties: classic; garlic; and chilli. I chose the classic as I was sure it would be a hit with us all where as the stronger flavours would be better suited to my husband and I.

The pouch gave very little information apart from the ingredients. When I picked up my review goodies I was told it could be stored in the cupboard but it had been in the fridge so I thought it was best to store it in the fridge at my place too. I also would have like to have known how long after opening it had to be used by. I did however find the pouch was very hand as it stood up in the fridge door and was resealable.

I decided to have the sauce with ravioli. The first thing I noticed when I opened the pouch was the aroma of red wine. It was very quick and simple to reheat the sauces an toss through the ravioli. Such a quick and easy meal on a busy evening.

Miss 7 was the first to try her meal. She commented that it was spicy. We thought it was just her being fussy until my husband and I tried it. Both of us found it much hotter than expected. I even checked on the packet that I had been given the classic variety, and yes it was. My husband grated some cheese to add to our bowls which definitely helped to cool it down for us. My husband and I quite enjoyed the flavour but I suspect we might have got the chilli variety in the wrong packaging as none of the other review I have read mention it being hot.

My husband and I will happily have this for dinner again but will serve the children something a bit more bland.

I really liked the enhanced tomato flavour of this product. Although there are several added spices, none of them is readily noticeable - they fuse with the tomato to strengthen the flavour but not to divert it from the true tomato taste which goes so well with a variety of dishes. I cannot imagine Italian cooking without lashings of tomatoes, and mixed with chopped herbs they are one of the essential ingredients of a salsa.

I thought I would try something a little different with this sauce so I decided to have a go at making an imitation butter chicken. I poached some chicken pieces in half the packet of sauce, adding a small amount of onion and a knob of butter. Because the sauce already contains spices that are compatible with the flavour I was aiming for, I did not add any more other than a pinch each of asafoetida, ginger and galangal powder plus a couple of pinches of kaffir lime zest. I knew it would not take very long to cook so while it was simmering I prepared the rice to accompany it. In place of a sweet chutney, I put some freshly sliced persimmon on to each plate.

Just before serving, I stirred in some coconut cream. I used about half a 400 ml tin, but because I was preparing the meal on taste rather than measured ingredients, I just kept adding the coconut until it tasted right. The result was delicious, not the same as commercial butter chicken I have eaten, but certainly palatable - and I had the benefit of knowing exactly what had gone into it.

The price is not too bad when you consider that the meal I cooked was enough for four people, and I still had the remaining part of the packet left. I used some of the pack for salsa the next day, mixing it with chopped onion, chopped cucumber, fresh basil and pine-nuts. We used it as a dip with some breadsticks and crackers, and it was lovely if a little inclined to drip here and there! However, we were outside, so that was not too serious.

I used the last part of the pack to finish off a frittata. It had the potential to be quite boring as I was using up some leftover vegetables and sometimes the finished product can lack zing. Half way through the cooking process, and after a skin had formed, I poured the tomato over the surface and then added some grated parmesan on top of that so that it would form a second crust on top of the first.

I think the price represents excellent value insofar as I got quite a lot of mileage out of it. Because it is not too highly flavoured, you can add your own ingredients to supplement the taste if you wish. And when the tomato season is several months away it is a good standby to have in the cupboard.

Nothing beats a good bolognese, and the heart of a bolognese is the sauce, of course. A good sauce can make a great meal, but a great sauce can make it something really special... so I was expecting something around the "quite good" range. What I got was something spectacular.

Making a bolognese usually takes me about an hour and half - frying the mince, sautee onions and capsicum, add the diced tomatoes, herbs and mince, simmer away until the sauce is starting to thicken, then adding in some mixed veges and leaving it to simmer away for another 10 minutes to cook the veges and thicken the sauce up fully while the spaghetti cooks... finally plating it all up. Thanks to this sauce being all made, it took me 25 minutes from "Hey, I know what to do for dinner..." to "first bite".

I was particularly impressed that I didn't need to add any extra seasonings to make this dish match my taste preferences - it had a rich range of flavours that were very well balanced, though some might find even the small amount of chilli in the mix a little too much - Kiwis have a notoriously bland palate when it comes to spicy food - but I still thought it was quite soft and only really showed itself if I ate too quickly.

I loved that this sauce can be kept in the cupboard until opened, then just sealed up and popped in the fridge... if there's any left, of course. The bag has a ziplock seal that is quite effective... almost TOO effective if the heat-seal is too close to the top of the ziplock, making it nigh on impossible to open... so I just use a Magic Lock bag sealer instead. That served me very well for the brief time I had sauce left over. (I drizzled the last of it on some leftover roast chicken and rice, then microwaved it. Utterly brilliant!)

Overall, loved it, as I thought I would, and look forward to seeing these hitting markets locally, and then supermarkets nationally one day!

I was rather excited to see this product up for review as a friend had been to the food show just a few days earlier and was telling me about the most delicious sauce she had tried while there, well this was it, and sadly I had managed to miss sampling it while at the food show somehow! Our family tends to eat a lot of tomato based dishes, mostly with mince and when it comes to choosing such sauces at the supermarket they really can be a bit hit and miss, with many of them being bland and tasteless. However this was not the case with the Classic Innestyle Sauce.

The sauce comes in a handy, clear plastic pouch which is resealable, great for when you don't want to use a whole 500mls of sauce at once! The design of the pouch also stands nicely upright in the fridge without taking up to much room which I also like. You can see the exact product which you are getting and straight away I could tell that this was one of good product due to the rich red colour of the sauce, it didn't look at all pale or as though it was filled with fillers or a heap of artificial colours or flavours, and upon reading the ingredients list you will see it most definitely doesn't contain any of these things.

I decided to make a lasagne up for dinner and used this in place of my usual tomato paste and canned tomatoes which are normally mixed together with a lasagne sachet mix from the supermarket. WOW the flavours this sauce gave were incredible, fresh and flavourful much nicer than my usual sauce, and combined with layers of pasta and cheese sauce it was a perfect match, my partner even went as far as saying this was the best lasagne I have ever made! I next used this sauce in place of a tablespoon of tomato paste in a dish I was creating 'Bellissimo Chicken' (a dish of chicken breasts filled with cream cheese, mozzarella and basil, wrapped in bacon, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and nestled in a sauce of diced tomatoes) and it worked well I loved that the flavour it provided with even such a small amount of this sauce.

With half a pouch of sauce left and another flavour to review I popped the remainder into the freezer for another day and it appears to have freezed with no problems which is great! A lovely quality product that seems to be made of only the finest ingredients, I'm hoping it may make it to a supermarket near me one day soon.