17 Italian Foods At Trader Joe's, Ranked

If you're looking to make an easy, delicious Italian dinner at home, Trader Joe's is a good place to turn. All we need is pasta and sauce, really, but let's add some fresh bread on the side, some vibrant pesto to dip it in, and some gourmet cheese that might just steal the show. Trying to add some meat? Turn to TJ's Italian-style meatballs. Looking to avoid meat altogether? Swap that Bolognese sauce for vegan pesto. So busy that even boiling water is making you cringe? Trader Joe's frozen foods have you covered. The store has plenty of Italian items to satisfy your every need, craving, and dietary concern. 

But as we all know, some Trader Joe's products are worth the hype and others are underwhelming. When shopping the picturesque, Instagram-worthy aisles, you might throw caution to the wind and over-excited, tossing everything that catches your eye into an overflowing cart. Then, when you actually get home and start trying everything, you realize that you should have done a bit of research beforehand

Luckily, we've done the work for you. Though the store has too many Italian options for even our dedicated team to try, we amassed a solid collection to taste, test, and rank. Read on to discover which Trader Joe's Italian foods are worth your time, energy, and dollars. 

We simply had to pick up one decadent Italian dessert to enjoy after all these pastas, right? The Tiramisu Torte, tucked away in the freezer section, really caught our eye. Tiramisu is a classic Italian dessert whose flavor combination — coffee, chocolate, and sweet cheese — is about as Italian as it gets. Traditional tiramisu is delicious but can be a hefty project to put together, so a frozen torte seemed like a convenient solution. 

Following the package directions, we let it thaw while tasting everything else, but probably more due to our own oversight than Trader Joe's, it melted a bit, stuck to the box, and just became a big old mess. The texture was pudding-like, sitting unsteadily on a base of chocolate sponge cake that tasted, well, a little too spongey. In spite of these design flaws, the tiramisu-flavored creamy goo tasted great. It was very light, actually not decadent at all, but we got all the notes of cocoa, espresso, and a cheesecakey tang. We probably won't buy this again, but it certainly inspired us to bake our own tiramisu and try every other tiramisu-flavored product on the market. Still, if you need an Italian-themed dessert in a flash that isn't gelato, this Tiramisu Torte will do.

We know what you're probably thinking: French Onion isn't Italian. How did this sneak its way in here? Well, focaccia bread is definitely and traditionally Italian, and what does Trader Joe's do best? Riff on the classics. We were excited to see how this decadent flavor profile complimented or took away from the bread we all know and love.

A traditional yeasted Italian bread, you can find all sorts of focaccia recipes and variances, from cute little single-serves to pristine chef-endorsed creations. And though we didn't expect a packaged Trader Joe's product to have the same oomph as something from your own kitchen or your local Italian bakery, we hoped it would beat, for example, the flats we could pick up at Walmart. Unfortunately, we had to dock points for it being a bit too dense and doughy. The bottom third of the loaf tasted almost underbaked. But that topping! It almost makes up for any defects with silky, savory caramelized onions and cheeses that really shine when heated up. It's indulgently flavored, but if you're also looking for a perfect baseline focaccia, the foundation is a bit shaky.

Clearly, a lot can go wrong with jarred pasta sauce. Too bland, too salty, too sweet, too watery, too cheap-tasting, too thick ... we've seen (and tasted) it all. For that reason, we didn't expect much when heating up this Bolognese Style Tomato & Beef Pasta Sauce. In true Bolognese fashion, it incorporates beef, but it's also shelf-stable, so how good can it be? Really good, in fact. This sauce is rich, velvety, and boasts a complex flavor. 

Naturally, there are more savory, spicy notes in a Bolognese than in a traditional plain tomato sauce, so when a Bolognese is boring, it's painful. This one's not. The meat doesn't taste fresh as a daisy, but it does soak up a lot of the tomato flavor and imparts a salty umami depth to the base sauce. Most of us agreed that it doesn't really taste like it came out of a jar. If you need a convenient Bolognese to have on hand, this is one of the best we've tried that doesn't break the bank like other more artisan brands sometimes do.

It's only recently that we discovered what the "wedding" in the quintessential Italian wedding soup actually refers to. Spoiler alert: the "wedding" is just the perfect marriage of the soup's components. And while Trader Joe's hedges its bets by calling its product just Italian-Style (and admits that it is a product not of Italy, but Canada), it tastes just as spot-on and authentic as we could have hoped. This one settles on mini meatballs, carrots, onions, kale, and tiny pasta gems all floating in a homey chicken broth infused with herbs. 

It's ridiculously soothing and tastes like the ideal Italian spin on traditional chicken noodle soup comfort food. We'd take mini meatballs over boring chunks of white-meat chicken any day. We wouldn't go so far as to break open jars of the stuff as the first course of our weddings, but we'd easily make it a weekday lunch staple. Thanks to its richer flavor and homemade depth, we like it better than the usual suspects like Progresso or Campbell's.

Pesto can be created from a variety of ingredients but starts with a pretty standard formula. You're going to need an herb, a nut, and oil (almost always olive oil). It sounds like the perfect opportunity for a sneaky vegan product to us. Trader Joe's knows what it's doing here. The Vegan Kale, Cashew, and Basil Pesto checks all the boxes: It uses nutrient-dense kale, vitamin-rich cashews, and all the aromatics that give pesto its pizzazz. 

Neither greasy nor oily, it flows swimmingly onto a flatbread or breadstick and would coat pasta with gusto. And while we love kale when well-prepared, we also love that the basil in this pesto takes center stage as opposed to that more aggressive leafy green. We can also see ourselves using it as a spread on sandwiches instead of mustard, or mayo, particularly in the summer months.

We always love good ravioli, so none of us had any issues with sampling two kinds from Trader Joe's. First, we encountered the ubiquitous Cacio e Pepe once again in these pasta squares. The shell is nice, not too thick and doughy, but also not so flimsy that the filling slips out. Listen closely when we say that this must be cooked properly for it to really shine. Too al dente and the filling is pasty and hard rather than gooey and vibrant, but if you let it boil too long you'll get a mushy one-note pasta that collides with its filling. If you want to have the same fantastic eating experience we had, you're going to need that cheesy filling to stand on its own feet. 

The bite of piquant black pepper does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the pasta from being too dull because as much as we wish it weren't so, the Parmesan flavor is somewhat muted. Without the "pepe", the ravioli would mostly just taste like your average cheese-filled variety (which you can get at Trader Joe's if traditional is more your jam.) Obviously, the vegetarian aspect is one of the best selling points, but we think that pairing this pasta with some prosciutto would be a nice salty, savory, umami-filled accessory.

This intriguing little wedge of Italian Bigonda Cheese with Herbs is a study in restraint. If you're not careful to savor it, you might miss its best qualities. This is not a cheese to haul out of the back corner of your fridge at midnight and devour without thinking — choose a cutting sharp cheddar for that instead. We suspect some people might characterize it as "meh." One or two of our taste testers shrugged and said it was just fine. 

It's a middling cheese, somewhere between hard and soft, with no challenging tang or funk and a mild flavor. But the flavor that's there is beautifully delicate thanks to an ethereal blend of backyard herbs like parsley and thyme, steeped in unusual aromatics like laurel leaf, fennel seed, and caraway seed powder. We had to look closely at the label to determine just what actually made it taste like a golden-hour walk in an Italian grove, but we still don't know which precise element sealed the deal. Maybe it's better left a mystery. 

Well now isn't this just a downright dashing ravioli? Pardon us — raviolini. What's the difference? Nobody knows, but it even sounds a little more dashing. This pasta incorporates burrata, the most luscious, decadent of Italian cheeses. Ultimately, it was pretty much just like regular mozzarella with an extra dose of creaminess. One of us noted that it's akin to putting heavy cream in your morning cup of coffee instead of regular half and half. As for the tomato, it definitely tasted bright and zesty. The interior of the ravioli is tender and melts in your mouth; they would be perfect with a light sauce in the summertime. 

These taste pretty exquisite, and if prepared perfectly al dente, we'd definitely be happy to eat a plate of them at a restaurant. We were ready for Trader Joe's to give us something good with these, but we didn't anticipate just how nuanced and fresh they tasted. Please, by all means, serve them alongside a crisp salad with cucumber and your most gorgeous tomatoes. Oh, and add some burrata on top, because why not? Thanks to these ravioli, we now have every excuse to pull out all the stops on our next pasta night and splurge on all our favorite accouterments.