Barbecue Sauces

Lesson

Go into any grocery store, and you’ll find bottle after bottle of BBQ sauce to choose from. With all that variety, you might be surprised to know that their ingredients are pretty much the same: some combination of tomato sauce, sugar, salt, pepper, garlic, more sugar, and maybe even red pepper.

But there’s more to BBQ sauce than this. In this lesson, we’ll share several different kinds of sauces you can create yourself—sauces that share the rich heritage of the places they came from: Georgia mustard-based sauce, Kansas City style sauce, and even Carolina vinegar-based sauce.

Georgia Sauce

The Georgian’s variety of yellow, mustard-based sauces are made of ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar and mustard. You can’t beat this sauce on a slice of fresh ham or a thick piece of pork shoulder. It’s also super on a good steak.

Carolina Sauces

In this region, there are several sauces. East of Raleigh you have your vinegar, black pepper, ground cayenne kind of vinegar sauce—a sauce that’s as simple as it is thin. On the other side of the state, you have the Piedmont variety of vinegar sauce. They use vinegar, pepper, red pepper and add ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, or molasses. In some places, they even add a bit of sugar to sweeten the pot, making a thin, red-colored sauce.

Kansas City Sauce

There’s a good reason Kansas City is known as the “meltin’ pot” of barbecue sauces. They use everybody else’s to create theirs. Kansas City sauces are made of tomato sauce, vinegar, salt, molasses, mustard, chilies or red pepper, and sugar (brown or white) to create a thick sauce. Most sauces you find in the grocery store are basically Kansas City style sauces, as barbecuers nationwide have expressed their love of this thick, sweet, tangy sauce.

Here are a few other regional varieties we’ve run into:

California – soy, hoisin, olive oil, garlic, vinegar-based sauces
New Mexico – chile powder, peppers, cayenne-based fiery sauces
Hawaii – fruit and soy-based tangy sauces
Pacific Northwest – fresh berries, ginger, soy, and garlic-based sauces
Alabama – white, egg, and mayonnaise-based sauces
Kentucky – black, peppery, thin sauces primarily for lamb & mutton
Memphis – tomato, molasses, vinegar; a brown-red sauce
Texas – thick, smoky tomato with no sugar

Is your mouth watering yet? Start making your own. Check out our barbecue sauce recipes!