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Home & Family Tips: BBQ Sauce

Every good dish comes with a good dressing and for BBQ, it is essential to have a good BBQ sauce to go with it. The favor of the BBQ sauce can do more than just add spice to the food you’re cooking. With a good sauce, a blunt and tasteless dish can be turned into a mouth watering dish and make you beg for more.

As American as the concept of a big cookout called a barbeque might be, the word is not even an English word, but comes from a group of Caribbean Indians that dried their meat on a high wooden platform. Nowadays, most people used the shortened form of ‘BBQ’ to describe this wonderful cooking party.

So much a part of the American scene, it seems like every region has its own style of BBQ and everyone has their own BBQ sauce recipe. That is because the sauce is really the center of the cooking. It does not matter what kind of meat that you grill, it is the sauce that gives the food its special flavor. In certain parts of the country, especially in the southwest, a BBQ sauce recipe becomes almost like a family secret or heirloom handed down from generation to generation.

Probably the simplest sauce is made from combining two cups of ketchup, two tablespoons of Worstcheshire Sauce, and two tablespoons of sugar together. It is simple and it is very tasty. However, BBQ sauce is one of those recipes that is only limited by your own imagination.

You can take a very basic recipe and change the whole flavor. Use the example above and add chopped onion for a completely different result. Or try garlic or basil or oregano instead of onion for something different. Or you can use all those ingredients at the same time and you have made a new BBQ sauce. The possibilities are endless.

Some cooks say that the only good BBQ sauce must have some beer in it for the proper flavor. Others demand that tequila is the right ingredient. Another will say that a touch of Kentucky bourbon is the way to do it. Here we go again. The recipe is only limited by a person’s creativity and what tastes good to them.

There are many foods that are much better if they are homemade. We only buy the ‘store bought’ variety for convenience and ease. Nevertheless, in fact much of the commercially made BBQ sauce is better than what you will make at home. That is because they too use their own ‘secret recipe’.

Remember that there can be two purposes to using BBQ sauce. You can marinate the meat in the sauce and you can use BBQ sauce to baste the meat while you are cooking. Sometimes a sauce that is good for basting is not as good for marinating. A BBQ sauce for marinating should have something acidic in it like vinegar or lime juice so that the meat will absorb the flavor.