The New Irish Sauce That Answers "What's For Dinner?" Every Single Night
It’s five o’clock. Someone is doing homework at the kitchen table, someone else is looking for a snack, the school bag is still in the hall and absolutely nobody has any idea what’s for dinner. If that sounds familiar, you are going to want to hear about this.
Ballymaloe Foods has just launched its new 100 Recipe Sauce, and honestly, the timing couldn’t be better. It’s a gently cooked tomato, onion and garlic base — tomatoes slowly simmered until rich and full-flavoured, onions and garlic already chopped and softly cooked — and it takes care of the first three steps of over 100 different home-cooked recipes. Pasta, curry, soup, stew, bolognese, pizza base, tuna bake. The list goes on.
The brains behind it are sisters Maxine and Rosaleen, who run Ballymaloe Foods together. Maxine is refreshingly honest about where the idea came from. “We’re launching 100 Recipe Sauce to help solve a problem I’ve experienced many times myself,” she says. “Getting a tasty dinner on the table at the end of a busy day. As mums, my sister Rosaleen and I know what it’s like to juggle everything and still have to decide what to cook. We wanted to create something that gives people a head start, with the first three steps already done, so they can cook from scratch without starting from scratch.”
Cook from scratch without starting from scratch. That phrase alone deserves a round of applause, because that’s exactly the guilt-free middle ground most of us are looking for. You’re still cooking a real meal. You’re not heating up a ready meal and feeling vaguely bad about it. You’re just not standing over a pan for forty minutes at the end of an already long day.
One jar, 100 ideas
Every jar of the 100 Recipe Sauce has a QR code on the label. Scan it and you’re brought straight to Ballymaloe Foods’ online recipe hub where all 100 recipe ideas are waiting for you. That alone is a small mercy on those evenings when your brain flatly refuses to think of anything beyond beans on toast.
The sauce is made with simple ingredients — nothing complicated, nothing you’d need to squint at the label to pronounce. It’s the kind of product that slots quietly into your weekly shop and starts earning its keep almost immediately. One jar in the fridge and the question “what’s for dinner?” becomes a lot less daunting.
Where to get it
Ballymaloe Foods 100 Recipe Sauce is available now in select Dunnes Stores and SuperValu stores nationwide. You can also order it online at the Ballymaloe Foods shop, with free postage on orders placed before 30 November. Worth stocking up.
Follow Ballymaloe Foods on social @ballymaloefoods for recipe inspiration and the latest updates.