Everyone’s favourite, barbecue sauce, can easily be made at home and you can make it as hot, acidic, sweet or peppery as you like.
Sweet and spicy, tangy and umami
That, in essence, is the taste of a good barbecue sauce: the four flavours, mixed in correct proportions. With the thousands different kinds and hundreds of brands of bottled sauces on the market, it is tricky to decide which is your all-time favourite. So why not make your own? If Brooklyn Beckham can, I’d say you can too.
How to achieve the balance of the four flavours? By tasting, and the beauty of cooking a sauce is that you can water it down and then thicken it up again while adjusting the taste.
I admit my recipe base comes from The Times’ barbecue recipe. But by cooking it and adjusting to your taste, you can make it your absolutely own. Eat your heart out, Heinz!
How to get the right taste?
The four elements of the flavour profile are easily achieved. Sweetness comes from honey, the spice from cayenne pepper and chilli powder. Apple cider and cider vinegar provide the tang, and umami is delivered by the soy sauce and tomato paste.
Cinnamon adds a subtly smoky flavour with woody undertones. Wait – am I writing a recipe or a perfume brand review? Joking, but I find cinnamon in savoury dishes extremely pleasant, adding a sweetly aromatic depth.
Cooking the barbecue sauce
And the cooking itself is super easy: all the ingredients into a medium rather than small saucepan, so the surface of the liquid is large enough to cook off quicker.
After about twenty-five minutes the condiment should be reduced by half.
The right texture
The sauce should be runny, but not running off and there isn’t much in the ingredients list there to thicken the texture considerably. Plus, an acidic sauce base with vinegar and cider will not thicken naturally, and there’s no powder or granules that would help the process.
That’s not a huge problem because a little cornflour will fix it very quickly. Once the sauce has reduced, simply stir some cornflour with a little water into a slurry, add it in and bring the sauce to a simmer again. You can start with half the amount of the slurry and see what the texture is, keeping in mind that the sauce will naturally thicken some more when it’s chilled.
Does it keep?
It certainly does, thanks to the acid and sugar it contains. Store it for up to ten days, but in a good BBQ season it will be gone in a blink of an eye.
But to be sure, it’s best to decant it into a sterilised bottle or jar.
How to sterilise preserving containers
I will not recommend my method for making baby food or very easily spoilt preserves like lacto-fermented vegetables or sauces made from fresh vegetables or fruit. But a small amount of barbecue sauce or jams high in sugar can easily live for a long time in a jar or a bottle simply sterilised in a low oven.
How to do it? First thoroughly wash the containers including lids or closures. Place them on a middle rack of the oven set to 90-100C (which is the food pasteurising temperature). Keep rubber bands out of the oven but put metal lids in, and keep the containers in there for at least half an hour.
Alternatively, for glass jars only with no lids or metal parts, naturally, place them wet from the washing in the microwave and blast for a couple of minutes at full power.
Take care removing the containers in either case – they’ll be hot, and will need to be placed on a cloth or a tea towel so they don’t crack or shatter on a cold surface.
More sauce and condiment recipes
Hot honey, the sweet and spicy condiment that is drizzled over pizzas, cottage cheese and roast chicken everywhere, is very easy to make very well and even easier to make on the quick, with a shortcut.
Fresh fig confit recipe: a confiture made with fresh figs, with whole chunks of fruit in syrup made with port or madeira wine. This fig confit is more versatile than jam, to serve also with cheese and meats. It will keep two weeks in the fridge.
Kewpie-style mayonnaise, the umami bomb of a condiment, which you can make at home in exactly one minute. A stick blender and a tall jar make true magic happen.
More barbecue side dish recipes
Homemade coleslaw is the best and this is a healthy version: no mayo, lovely seasoning, yoghurt dressing and a variety of lightly fermented vegetables. No more roughly shredded cabbage slathered in gloopy mayo! For other exciting slaw recipes check out kohlrabi slaw and leek slaw.
You simply cannot NOT have a jar of spicy onion pickles at a barbecue, and these are super quick, easy and vibrant. They are sweet and slightly spicy, or really hot if that’s what you like and you bump up the chilli content.
Ditch the boring traditional Greek salad for the pared down, more exciting version with half the effort: cucumbers with feta and honey. Refreshing and crunchy, salty and sweet: who could resist such an outstanding combination of flavours? Also, cucumbers without tomatoes are better for your digestion.