A Cheap Sweet Treat

A found a lovely strawbeery flavoured ice cream sauce when shopping, below is my review for it..

As you can imagine with 3 boys in my house ice cream is a favourite and so too are the toppings. I was about to pick up my regular branded ice cream sauce when I spotted this value one. I have had a lot of success with Value products in the past so did not hesitate to put this in he trolley as it was also saving me a few pennies.

~~PACKAGING~~

The sauce comes in a plastic tub which is white in colour. On the front we have the Tesco Value logo and a red banner with the product name in. There is a picture of a dish of ice cream with the sauce being dribbled over it. The back of the tube has the product information on, ingredients and nutritional values on.

The bottom of the tube has a screw cap on which is how the sauce is to be dispensed. This is also a good design as it means the tube is very easy to stand up in the cupboard and it is always at the bottom of the tube ready to be squeezed out.

~~TASTE AND USE~~

It really is very simple to use the sauce, the screw cap just needs to be unscrewed and then the sauce squeezed through the small opening. When using for the first time you will have to remove the small foil covering which covers the opening but this simply pulls off. The design of the bottle means the sauce is always ready to come straight out. When the bottle is full the sauce comes out with very little squeezing at all but as it empties more force will be needed.

The sauce is a good red colour and not overly runny or thick. I like the consistency as it means it is easy to pour the sauce but it is not too runny that it just all slops out and runs off the top of the ice cream. The amount of sauce used is entirely up to each individual user, we tend to use a lot for each sitting ass we have three ice creams to cover in it.

The taste of the sauce was a pleasant surprise to me, I thought that it may be lacking in a little flavour seeing as it is a value product but this is not the case. There is a rich strawberry flavour and this goes exceptionally well with vanilla ice cream. It is not overly sweet and it does leave a very pleasant taste in the mouth. I do find that it is best eaten with ice cream and not on its own as it can become slight thick and I find it sticks in my teeth and after a lot I do get the feeling of it becoming quite sickly. The sauce does have a nice smell to it which is only noticeable when you have a good close sniff. It is light and smells of fresh strawberries and this does intensify when you squeeze the sauce out of the tube.

My boys love the sauce and they even like the fact that I have changed the brand. They love the fact the sauce is always ready to come out the bottle and that it is simpler for them to use by themselves. They love the taste and find it goes well with all of the different flavours, they do even add this to their dishes of jelly as well.

~~INFO~~

The sauce’s tube size is 225g and I find this last for a good few weeks even with us using quite a lot on each sitting. The shelf life is also very good and the latest tube we bought a week ago has over 12 months on it, this means it is a good product to have in the cupboard for those times when you fancy a sweet treat.

The ingredients fro the sauce include:-

Glucose syrup, concentrated Strawberry juice, concentrated elderberry juice, citric acid, natural flavourings.

The recipe does not contain nuts but Tesco cannot guarantee that the ingredients do not contain them. This has been made in a nut free factory though. This sauce is suitable for vegetarians .

The nutritional values for 1 tablespoon of the sauce are:-

Calories – 47
Sugar – 7.9g
Fat – trace
Saturates – trace
Salt – trace

Considering this is a sweet treat I do think these values are pretty good.

The sauce needs to be stored in a cool and dry place and is best kept out of the refrigerator. I have personally placed my tube in the fridge for a week and found it thickens up too much so have started to place it in the cupboar5d and it seems back to its normal consistency now. It does not really need to be chilled as it is designed to go over frozen ice cream which will cool it down anyway.

~~PRICE AND AVAILABILITY~~

This strawberry ice cream sauce is a Tesco value product so it can only be bought in their stores. It comes price at just over 80p and I do think this is a complete bargain considering the branded sauces can be as much as £2 per tube.

~~RECOMMENDED?~~

I have found this sauce to be great, it tastes lovely and the bottle design is great. The overall results we have had mean that all my family enjoy it and we are now saving money which we can spend on extra ice cream. This sauce gets the full 5 stars from all my family and a high recommendation. Stock up for the summer.