What's The Difference Between Pesto And Pasta Sauce?
It might seem obvious, but some people confuse pesto and pasta sauce. Here, we're looking under the bonnet of each to see how they compare in terms of nutrition, calories, and taste.
NOTE: All figures quoted represent existing sauces for sale in the UK, but they will vary considerably from brand to brand.
First, let's set the goal posts
The elephant in the room is that pesto is a sauce commonly served with pasta, making it a pasta sauce, right? Yes, but when Brits say "pasta sauce," they usually refer to the generic, tomato-based sauce famous in Italian-American cuisine that has kept many students alive on a minuscule budget.
Let's choose our pasta sauce
We want to be clear about what we're comparing, which is complicated because Italian cuisine boasts dozens of tomato-based sauces. We love the rich and spicy arrabbiata, the anchovy and caper-based puttanesca, and the guanciale-lased amatriciana. However, the simplest of them all is Pomodoro, and that's the one we're going to use as our control here.
Let's choose our pesto sauce
There are so many different kinds of pesto on the market, including the bright red, sun-dried tomato, which is visually similar to Pomodoro. For the sake of this article, though, we're talking about pesto Genovese, the most authentic pesto of all.
Similarities between pesto and pasta sauce
Other than being synonymous with Italian cuisine and making great accompaniments to pasta and pizza, the comparisons end there.
Differences between pesto and pasta sauce
There are almost too many differences to list, but the ingredients, texture, flavour, calorie content, and nutritional content of the two sauces are completely different. That is why you simply can't substitute one for the other.
Calories
Let's start by seeing how they compare calorie-wise. Because a bit of pesto goes a long way, we recommend a single serving size of around 50g. We're allowing just over 100g per person for the pasta sauce.
Ingredients and calories in a single serving of tomato sauce
| Ingredient | Grams | Calories |
| Tomatoes | 100 | 22 |
| Olive oil | 2.5 | 20 |
| Garlic | 2.5 | 2 |
| Basil | 1 | <1 |
| Salt | pinch | <1 |
| TOTAL | 106 | 44 |
Ingredients and calories in a single serving of pesto
| Ingredient | Grams | Calories |
| Olive oil | 20 | 165 |
| Basil | 18 | 4 |
| Pine nuts | 7.5 | 50 |
| Parmesan | 7.5 | 32 |
| Pecorino | 5 | 22 |
| Garlic | 1 | 1 |
| Salt | pinch | <1 |
| TOTAL | 60 | 274 |
So, even though both sauces contain olive oil, garlic, and basil, the pesto contains over six times more calories than the traditional pasta sauce.
Of course, this is either a good or bad thing, depending on whether you're more interested in flavour and nutrition or your waistline. Before we conclude that pasta sauce is clearly healthier than pesto, it's important to look at the nutritional values of each sauce and see how they compare.
The difference in nutrition between 100g pesto and 100g pasta sauce
| Nutrition | Pasta sauce | Pesto |
| Fat | 2.5g | 42g |
| saturates | 0.4g | 7.5g |
| Carbohydrate | 8g | 7.5g |
| sugars | 6.5g | 1.4g |
| Protein | 1.5g | 6.4g |
| Sodium | 0.9g | 1.8g |
Pesto has a shockingly high fat content compared to regular pasta sauce. Dieticians and proponents of the Mediterranean diet always tell us that olive oil is high in "good" monounsaturated fat. That is true, but they usually fail to mention that it also contains high levels of saturated fat, usually about 13% of its weight. That's before you've even factored in the nuts and cheese, which are high-fat ingredients.
Higher sugar content is expected with pasta sauce, especially if made with sweeter varieties of tomatoes. However, that's natural sugar, not at a high enough level to cause you to lose sleep.
There's one more important comparison to be made: the levels of vitamins and minerals each sauce contains. The percentages below show how much of your daily requirements you get from a single serving of sauce.
How much of your recommended daily number of vitamins and minerals do you get from one serving?
| Vitamins | Pasta sauce | Pesto |
| Vitamin A | 16% | 10% |
| Vitamin C | 20% | 24% |
| Vitamin D | 0% | 6% |
| Iron | 9% | 15% |
| Calcium | 6% | 33% |
| Potassium | 8% | 4% |
As you would expect, pesto's wider variety of ingredients means it does slightly better in the vitamin and mineral stakes. Pesto outsmarts tomato sauce in many of these, but the pasta sauce still provides a sizeable chunk of your recommended daily targets.
In conclusion
Pesto and pasta sauce are chalk and cheese in almost every way, even though they taste great and are at their finest when paired with top-quality pasta. However, they're not as interchangeable as people may think. There's no doubt that pasta sauce is considerably healthier from a calorie and fat content perspective, but we're outlandishly biased and think pesto wins hands down in the flavour department.