How Long Is Jarred Pasta Sauce Still Good After Being Opened?

Jarred pasta sauce is a convenient shortcut to a delicious dinner; all you have to do is pop open the lid on that Rao's or Carbone, pour it onto your pasta of choice, add some meatballs, link sausages, and a healthy dose of parmesan to round out the dish, and there you have it — a tasty, simple spaghetti with marinara (or a fettuccine Alfredo or creamy vodka penne, depending on your preferred sauce). If you don't use the entire jar, however, you might be wondering for how long you have to finish it up.

Tomato-based pasta sauce that has been store-bought is good for up to six days in the fridge before it starts to go bad. Cream-based sauces, like your Alfredos, are only good for up to four days. While most jarred pasta sauces are indeed nonperishable while they remain unopened, once the lid has been twisted off, the clock starts ticking.

And not just for its fridge-life; as soon as the lid comes off and the pasta sauce requires refrigeration, you have two hours to get it in there before it starts to become a health hazard. After two hours, perishables enter what is known by the USDA as the "danger zone," or the temperature range between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, when bacterial growth becomes a major risk.

Sometimes your spaghetti sauce will go bad before the prescribed period, or you'll open a jar that has been sitting in your pantry for over a year and wonder. There are a few key signs to look for that will clue you in on whether your pasta sauce has spoiled, starting with mold. (While you might have kept the sauce in the fridge and never left it out for longer than two hours, spores can still make their way into the jar, especially if you used a dirty spoon to ladle it out, or if the lid wasn't on tightly, for example.) The appearance of mold is a sure sign that your pasta sauce is bad, and the entire jar needs to be thrown out.

If there's no visible mold on your sauce, you might be put off immediately by the smell when you take off the lid. Food that has gone bad has a distinctive odor, a nasty rancid or sour scent. If your sauce smells like this, don't taste it — it could be harboring bacteria that might make you sick. If, however, there is no mold and no odor, go ahead and give the sauce a little taste. If it tastes fine, great! You'll immediately be able to tell if it tastes rotten, but even if it tastes slightly "off," you should still toss the jar — better safe than sorry.

If you opened a jar of pasta sauce, didn't use it all, and don't know when the next time you'll use it will be, you can absolutely pop it in the freezer and extend its shelf life (homemade marinara sauce freezes exceptionally well, too). You will probably want to move it to a freezer-safe airtight container; even better, you can freeze it in a Ziploc bag, laid flat so that it defrosts faster when you need it, or you can portion it out into different sizes so you don't have to defrost it all at once when you're only using a little bit.

Pasta sauce maintains its quality for up to six months in the freezer, and you can probably get by with a few extra months if you don't mind a little degradation in freshness. Be sure to write the date on the container or bag so you can keep track of how long it's been. If you think of it the night before, you can place the sauce in the fridge to defrost overnight; but if you forget, you can just put it in a pot, set the heat to low, and stir as it warms up.