Some people pursue the perfect car, or the perfect mate, or the perfect job. For several years, I've been stupid enough to pursue the perfect homemade, fresh BBQ sauce. I've tried many, many recipes. At some point, I arrived at my base fresh BBQ sauce. Then I wasted a bunch more time tweaking that sauce in every direction I could imagine.
The first time I ever cooked fresh sauce, I kept going back to the fridge to taste it over and over. I loved it. That spell lasted for quite some time. Then I started noticing the things that bugged me about it. Pretty soon, that's all I could notice - the mistakes, the shortcomings.
Then one day one of my best buddies and one of my BBQ mentors called me when I was in the middle of making sauce. He asked me what I was doing and I told him. He said, "Cool. So you're making spaghetti sauce. How is it?" Light bulb moment. Fresh BBQ sauce IS spaghetti sauce minus the basil and oregano and kicked up with a bunch of vinegary and sweet stuff. It's become a running joke between us because he ran into the same problems I did and, unlike me, was smart enough to end the quest and go with what works (no, not Cattleman's).
So, I recently picked up Serious Barbecueby Adam Perry Lang. It's the BBQ cookbook I've been seeking for a long time. I'm not going to go into why right now, because that's going to be covered in an upcoming post. But Adam's fresh bbq sauce recipe was different enough from mine, plus he has major credibility as a chef and restaurateur in NYC. I decided to cook both my sauce and his sauce and see if he had solved the issues that had be torturing me for so long.
So, I'm going to walk you through Adam's recipe and point out where I do things differently in my sauce. Both sauces are built in the same manner.
Adam's sauce starts by softening one chopped onion, five garlic cloves and one chopped bell pepper in a half cup of vegetable oil to establish a vegetable base for the sauce. I start by rendering a half cup of diced bacon before adding my vegetables. Also, I only use about a quarter of a bell pepper as opposed to the whole thing. Bell pepper is one of the things that has come to bug me about these sauces, but they do bring enough flavor to the party to warrant their presence. Adam also adds in bourbon after the vegetables have cooked for about 8 minutes and then lets the bourbon cook off before moving on to the next step.
Next Adam throws a spice blend of chili powder, black pepper, allspice, and cloves into the fat so as to toast them and release some flavor before adding all the wet stuff. I do the same thing but I just use my pork rub which is loaded down with about 15 different spices. I was impressed Adam went to the trouble to try and toast the spices in the fat. For years, I used to just dump my spices in the sauce after adding tomato product and vinegar. I was watching Cook's Illustrated one day and they were toasting their spices for a sauce and I realized what a dummy I had been. I was shorting myself out on some potential flavor.
Here is the whole mess after the spices have incorporated. In my sauce, I go a little decadent here and throw in a stick of butter before adding the tomato product and everything else.
Here is Adam's sauce after I added ketchup, water, cider vinegar, blackstrap molasses, mustard, hot sauce, and apricot preserves. I had to transfer to a non-stick wide based pan because I was already starting to get some vegetables sticking and burning in the other pan. This is a nasty mistake that is all to easy to make. If your base begins to burn it will ruin the whole thing. In my sauce, I opt for tomato puree instead of ketchup. I don't use any mustard at all. I use twice as much cider vinegar as Adam does. I thought the apricot preserves were a nice touch on Adam's part. I've never considered adding any sort of fruity, sugary, jammy substance.
This next step is where Adam really takes a left turn on me. He has us add one Granny Smith apple and one jalapeno (no seeds) that have been run across a microplane. Seemed like a great idea and I'll probably adopt it in my future sauces. I've done plenty of fresh sauces that incorporate green apples, but never microplaned. The last step is to hit the sauce with a stick blender (aka boat motor) or to let it cool a good bit and throw it in the blender or food processor to puree to a smooth texture.
And that's it. Fresh BBQ sauce in a nutshell.
So, was Adam's sauce better? Nope. It certainly had different flavors hanging around in small doses, but ultimately they were pretty much the same sauce. And that meant they had the same problems. For me now, fresh sauces (on their own) have a slightly bitter, metallic aftertaste. My good buddy, Dave, is all but certain this has to do with the tomato product and lack of high fructose syrup. I tend to agree with him. I could definitely pick up the allspice and cloves in Adam's sauce, whereas mine just tastes sorta pork rub-like. The mouth-feel was the same. It was a weird set of emotions for me as I stood there tasting them both at the same time (over and over). I was disappointed because I had not found my rosetta stone. I was happy because this published, restaurant-owning dude hadn't dialed it in any better than I had. I was relieved because I was finally ready to let this perfect fresh sauce boondoggle go and move onto to a new obsession.
Let me make this much clear. If you have never cooked a fresh bbq sauce, you really need to try. It is a great change of pace from the commercial stuff. If you cook for friends and use a fresh sauce, you are guaranteed to blow them away. However, don't go crazy trying to compare your homemade bbq and sauce against whatever you are buying at your favorite local bbq joint. BBQ restaurants do not make fresh sauce. If they tell you they are cooking their own sauce, that usually means they are opening gallon jugs of stuff, combining it, possibly heating it, and then putting it into little plastic squirt bottles. They are doing it for a damn good reason. It is expensive as hell to make a fresh sauce. A gallon of a fresh sauce like this is going to be three to four times more expensive than using pre-made bottled sauces jacked up in whatever manner and it is going to be a major pain in the ass as well. Remember that the restaurant business is first about making money. Fresh sauces don't make good fiscal sense on a large scale, but they are great for treating yourself and your friends to something special at home. So, now that you know the secrets, go make yourself some spaghetti sauce and chow down.
