The Best Store-Bought BBQ Sauces That Are Great Right Out of the Bottle
The best grocery store bottled barbecue sauces offer what homemade versions offer: a balance of smokiness, sweetness, spiciness and tanginess.
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Though purists will no doubt scoff, bottled barbecue sauce is not some great sin unto the world. Many of the best options are simplified versions of sauces made by pitmasters you or I could never hope to match.
But like most goods previously made in the home, store-bought sauce can also suck. Sometimes terribly so. The trap many fall into is excess in one of the four pillars of barbecue-sauce flavor — heat, smokiness, tanginess and, the most commonly abused, sweetness. We scoured the web, grocery stores and barbecue forums to find out which retail-available, bottled barbecue sauces are actually worth putting on the meat you’ve spent all day smoking.
What Is Barbecue Sauce
Despite the best efforts of the bottom-shelf BBQ sauces at the supermarket, barbecue sauce is more than just sweet and smoky ketchup. In fact, it's far more than a monolith, with a wide range of styles originating in various regions throughout the (mostly southern) United States. But what they all share in common is a contrasting mix of sweet, spicy, smoky and tangy flavors that makes them the perfect complement to grilled and smoked meats.
Although people have been using similar sauces and marinades to cook meat since long before there was a United States of America, the BBQ sauce that we know and love got its start in the American South during the Colonial Period. It was there that a disparate collection of ingredients from around the world came together — vinegar and salt from Spain, tomatoes from South America, sugar and molasses from the Caribbean and chile peppers from Central America — and began to be mixed in various ways. Those combinations became honed over the ensuing decades (and a couple of centuries) to eventually transform into the variety of sauces we use today.
Types of Barbecue Sauce
Kansas City Style
The most widely available style of barbecue sauce at grocery stores is at its best a balanced mix of tomato (ketchup, most of the time), sweetness, tang and smoke. This is the gloopy reddish-brown sauce you slather all over ribs — it’s great for its strong hold to meats and overall body as well.
Texas Style
Sometimes called “mop sauce” or “mop style,” these are sauces with a tomato and vinegar base. They’re typically much lighter in body than KC-style sauces, but not as light as a Carolinian vinegar sauce. They’re also applied with a lighter hand than most sauces, and feature lots of garlic, black pepper and Worcestershire sauce.
Memphis Style
Memphis barbecue tends to be served sans sauce, but there has been an uptick in Memphis-style barbeque sauces. The sauce is similar to a Kansas City-style barbeque sauce but with a richer sweetness thanks to molasses and a tad more brightness from a generous addition of vinegar.
Lexington Style (Western North Carolina)
Though some of North Carolina’s population may protest, this is essentially an earlier version of the uber-popular Kansas City sauce, sans-spiciness and with a lot more tomato product. If you don’t like the spiciness and bite that comes with a lot of KC sauces, this style is for you.
East North Carolina Vinegar-Based
It’s vinegar, pepper, salt and pepper flakes. The most fluid sauce there is gets most of its flavor from the tart vinegar and various pepper flakes and pepper powders added (cayenne being the most common). It may not be all that useful in caramelizing the outside of a pig, but it’s still delicious.
Japanese Style
While not a traditional part of American barbecue culture, Japanese BBQ sauce makes for an excellent substitution when you're looking to mix things up. The thin and runny sauce is rich with umami flavor thanks to its base of soy sauce and mirin complemented by heavy doses of ginger and garlic.
How We Tested
