Homemade BBQ Sauce AND What To Do With It

I love barbecue in (almost) all its forms. This is probably why I run out of BBQ sauce more often than I want to admit. The good news is that making homemade BBQ sauce is really easy.

I use the recipe I make on just about everything. Or almost everything.

The only problem is the ingredients. I’ve talked a lot before about how I care about what I put into my body.

Have you ever taken a look at the ingredients on a bottle of barbecue sauce? Yikes, it’s a mile long, and I can’t pronounce most of them. And the healthy or organic barbecue sauces get expensive, so I go the easy route instead.

Yes, the easy route. I make my own barbecue sauce. I love it because it’s super quick to put together, and I’ll alter the proportions, put in some extra ingredients, or just change things around depending on my mood. This is the way I like my barbecue sauce, and you may like yours a little differently, so play with it.

Doesn’t ketchup have a lot of extra ingredients?

And yes, the base ingredients for this include ketchup, which frequently has more ingredients that I just don’t like to eat. Actually, I’m not a big ketchup fan to begin with.

That said, I use the organic ketchup from Trader Joe’s which is surprisingly inexpensive, and this is a ketchup where I actually like the taste. Go fig.

Once again, organic tastes better than conventional to me – and I did a blind taste test, in case you think I’m biased. I also use organic whole-grain mustard (and sometimes yellow when I want to finish off the jar) simply because to me it tastes better and has fewer ingredients, which was the whole point of making my barbecue sauce anyway, right?

Oh yeah. And because it tastes awesome. And when you’re cooking, you always have to do taste tests, right?

What kind of vinegar should I use for BBQ sauce?

For BBQ sauce, your standard distilled white vinegar works just fine. You don’t need anything fancy or more than what you probably have in your pantry.

While many white vinegar brands have decreased the acidity lately, that does not impact this recipe. It is not like making dill pickles where the new acidity levels mean they don’t turn out quite right anymore and you have to really watch the vinegar you purchase.

How do you use homemade BBQ sauce?

So what do I do with my barbecue sauce after I’ve made it? Obviously, I store it in the fridge, but that wasn’t the question, was it?

Little Miss asked for Sloppy Joe’s the other night, so I whipped up the barbecue sauce then browned ground beef with diced onion and some salt and pepper before finishing it by cooking it with the barbecue sauce and some extra vinegar. Yum.

Or I’ll poach chicken and shred it, then reheat it in a saucepan with the barbecue sauce and serve it either by itself or in a flour tortilla as a barbecue taco. If I want to really make good BBQ chicken, I use this BBQ shredded chicken recipe that starts with a simple rub and is so tasty!

I’ll cook pork in a crock pot for hours on end, then pull it out and shred it and put it back in with the barbecue sauce for a half hour or so or do an Instant Pot BBQ pulled pork no one can resist.

It’s also a perfect topping for a fresh burger, especially with a good cheddar cheese and some caramelized onion. This would be absolutely delicious with this BBQ chicken pasta, too.

The uses for barbecue sauce are endless. How do you use your barbecue sauce?

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How to Make Homemade Barbecue Sauce

Place all ingredients into a heavy saucepan. Turn on the heat and stir. Bring to a slow boil, and boil the sauce for two or three minutes. Either add to your meat immediately or cool and refrigerate for up to a week. Uhhhh, yeah it’s that easy.

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