BBQ Sauce

We made pulled pork again. This time around I thought it would be nice to kick things up a notch and make our own bbq sauce. These days it seems like everyone and their momma has a bbq sauce, many recipes are closely guarded secrets and equally as many are available for imitation. There is a seemingly infinite combination of bbq sauce regions, flavors, consistencies, special ingredients and cooking methods. To cut through the noise I turned to my most trusted source in the culinary world: America’s Test Kitchen. America’s Test Kitchen is a long running PBS program that takes a scientific approach to crafting a recipe. They test out all of the leading recipes and techniques for a particular dish and create a hybrid recipe from the best results. If you are not watching you are missing out.

My slightly augmented version of their bbq sauce recipe:

1 yellow onion, fine mince

4 cups chicken broth, low sodium

1 cup dark corn syrup

1 cup root beer

1 cup apple cider vinegar

½ cup tomato paste

½ cup molasses

½ cup ketchup

2 tbsp Gulden’s mustard

1 tbsp Tabasco sauce

½ tsp garlic powder

1. Heat vegetable oil in large saucepan, large enough to hold the 9 or so cups of ingredients
2. Cook onion over medium heat until soft and translucent, 10-15 minutes
3. Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil
4. Reduce heat to little less than medium and simmer uncovered until sauce has reduced by half, 1-1.5 hours