A Personal Quest for BBQ Sauce
A Personal Quest for BBQ Sauce
Random thoughts BBQ Sauce, feeding your soul, and chasing the dream you keep playing around with in your head (or is that just me).
““You can’t buy happiness but you can BBQ and that’s kind of the same thing.”
— Author Unknown
Afternoons spent in the kitchen with my Grandmother baking cookies and egg custard are among my fondest childhood memories. Those experiences lit the spark within and fueled my lifelong pursuit of making food that makes people smile. Nothing is more satisfying (or more worthwhile).
Cooking so captured my attention my mid-twenties life plan was to finish grad school, teach at a university until I got tenure, then escape to France on sabbatical to study cooking. A dream that included visions of my own restaurant at the beach one day — a dream now lurking in the shadows fueling my passion for spending my weekends cooking BBQ and making my own BBQ sauce.
From my iphone.
Let’s get one thing straight (spoken in my best authoritative BBQ dude voice):
BBQ is NOT GRILLING.
Grilling is a wonderful way to prepare tasty food outdoors using a grill.
But it is not BBQ.
Barbecue is about patience and passion. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But everyone I know who BBQ’s is deadly serious about their process, their ingredients, their flavors, their set-up, and their tools. They’ll spend hour after hour regaling you with the ups and downs of the fickle pursuit impacted by wind speed, wind direction, and the inherent uncertainty of how the wood and/or charcoal will choose to burn on any given day.
They will confuse you when they talk about making sure there is no bark on the smoke wood they use in one breath and then get excited about great bark in the next. The latter refers to the borderline crunchy exterior of a perfectly BBQ’ed cut of meat that is deemed irrelevant if there is no visible smoke ring beneath the slight crunch.
Oh, and then there’s the rub, aka the spice mix put on the meat before it goes onto the pit for the low and slow cooking process. A topic for days, weeks, months, and in some cases years of discussion and debate.
And, finally, there’s BBQ sauce.
Arguments abound. Vinegar-based, sweet, spicy, sweet and spicy, hot and spicy, or the old school thinking of many: when cooked right the last thing BBQ needs is sauce!
FYI, I land somewhere in the middle. Well prepared BBQ really doesn’t need sauce. The combination of the rub, the right wood smoke, and the slow cooking brings out the best of the flavor within whatever you’re cooking. And if you’re smart enough to know to let it rest after cooking so the juices get reabsorbed, the end result will be impressive on its own.
Yet despite my devotion to letting the meat speak for itself, I still like a touch of BBQ sauce to add flavor to the bite. Because, ultimately, BBQ is all about the bite (thus the tagline on my BBQ sauce in the above photo—It’s all about the bite!).
The stories of ridiculously early mornings, stupidly long cooks (the term used to describe each iteration of making BBQ), and all of the trials and tribulations of getting the temperature just right and maintaining it for hours matter not. What matters is how it tastes when you eat the first un-sauced bite.
The sauce, my friend, is for the second bite, and the third (and beyond).
And I’m on a serious personal quest — to create a killer BBQ without using the dominant ingredient in most — sugar.
That’s right. I am committed to creating a sugar-free, keto-friendly BBQ sauce, and I’m getting very close. You can see the current test batch in the photo above, paired with the two pork butts smoked for a family get together yesterday. It’s a cherry themed sauce with just back of the throat warmth and a lot of depth.
So why am I writing about BBQ and this little sauce quest of mine in a publication dedicated to bringing out the best in ourselves every day?
For one simple reason — the way we do anything is pretty much the way we do everything. And it’s important for us to step away from the main things we do to spend time doing other things to hone our skills and expand our perspectives.
That is why I BBQ. It mirrors my work in so many ways — the details matter, the process is crucial and must be trusted, the comfort with mistakes and the commitment to fix them is the minute-to-minute reality, and what matters, in the end, is the impact. For BBQ the sine qua non is the smile on the face of the person taking the bite and the little spark of joy in their eyes. The impact of the rest of my work takes more time to be realized and seen. And that is why I will keep BBQing.
Today’s Action Question
What do you do to get away from the work you do every day and how does it sharpen your skills and make you better? I’d love to know. If you received this via email, please take a couple of minutes to hit reply and share your passion pursuit with me? But be warned if it has anything to do with BBQ, the conversation may become an ongoing one.
Here’s to a wondrous week filled with discovery and a few good bites!
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P.S. If you’re finding value in these posts, please take a moment to share them with someone you know who needs to be inspired to think differently and become the person they are capable of becoming. You might be able to help them take the most important step — the first one.