Barbecue Sauce

There are people in the world that are very proud of their barbecue sauces. Some of those people are professional barbecuers, who live and die on the strength of their rub and their sauce. You are unlikely to get their recipe out of these people.

Other people have secret barbecue sauce recipes that consist of adding some grape jelly, cola, or bourbon to a store-bought barbecue sauce. While there is nothing wrong with customizing an existing sauce to your needs, you lose some things by doing it this way. Aside from all of the usual problems with processed foods (preservatives, inferior ingredients, too much salt, and so on), you are at the whims of the manufacturer. If that sauce changes its formula or stops being sold, your secret recipe is gone.

At A Year From Scratch, we don't like to simply customize an existing product, nor do we like keeping secrets. For you, I have made a barbecue sauce, and more importantly, a method for creating a barbecue sauce of your very own. I hope you share your sauce with others, but I know how some people get with barbecue.

The great thing about a barbecue sauce is that it is, in this case, essentially a tomato sauce, of the kind you can make without a recipe. To that end, I didn't use a recipe when I made this one. I just picked a bunch of ingredients I thought would taste good and added them into the normal tomato sauce. What I got was not a barbecue sauce that you'd really point to and say, "Kansas," "North Carolina," or what-have-you. Melanie thinks it's a lot closer to a Mexican or a South American style barbecue sauce.

You start with some vegetables. I used carrots, celery, onion, chiles, and garlic. The important thing is a base of aromatic vegetables that will go well with your other ingredients. You're likely to want some spice in there, but how much is up to you.

Clean and dice all the veg:

And set aside your other ingredients:

That looks like some whole tomatoes, a leftover, frozen chipotle chile in adobo sauce from when I made chili, some chili powder, cocoa powder, liquid smoke (you can make this from scratch, but I never have), sorghum molasses, and bourbon.

Next comes the soffrito. This is also known as a "sweat", and in Italian it means "softly fried." The idea is that you want to cook your vegetables over lowish heat to get their cell structures to weaken and to release flavorful juices, but without changing the flavor with the maillard reactions. The best way to do this is to add your harder to cook vegetables first, followed in turn by the next hardest to cook, and so on. You can get recommendations for what to cook in which order for standard ingredients (carrots, then celery, then onion, then garlic, for example), but you can also get a feel for the vegetable by determining how dense it is and how tight the cellular structure is. If it's hard to bend and it's heavy, it'll probably take longer to cook.

Start with the carrots and the chiles. I would add some salt at this step to help soften the structure:

Cook for a bit, add the celery:

Cook for a bit, add the onions, add a bit more salt:

Cook for a bit, and finally add the garlic:

Once your garlic has softened a bit, add everything else, and simmer for an hour or so, covered.

When the flavors are working together fairly well, understanding that it the flavors won't be final until you've pureed, reduce down the sauce for a bit. You don't want it as thick as ketchup, but you want it a bit thicker than standard tomato sauce.

Now puree, either with a stick blender or with a regular blender. If you have time, let it cool off first.

Taste, and make any adjustments that you feel are worthwhile. Then put over some tasty food, and enjoy.

If you want something a bit more traditional, try working from the ketchup recipe and modify from their to suit your tastes. My ketchup was pretty close to a barbecue sauce as it was, so it wouldn't take much to bring it the rest of the way.

South American Style Barbecue Sauce

Ingredients

• 2 carrots, diced
• 3 celery sticks, diced
• 1/2 large onion, diced
• 3 chiles, seeded and diced,
• 2 cloves of garlic, diced
• 2, 28-oz cans of whole tomatoes
• 1/4 cup bourbon
• 1 scant tsp liquid smoke
• 1/2 cup molasses, sorghum if you have it
• 2 tbsp cocoa
• 4 tbsp vinegar
• 1 ancho chile in adobo sauce

Directions

1. Soffrito the carrots, celery, onion, chiles, and garlic.
2. Add the rest of the ingredients
3. Simmer for 1 hour, covered
4. Remove cover, simmer to reduce buy 1/4
5. Blend with regular or immersion blender.
6. Salt to taste