End of the year BBQ Sauce

For almost ten years Don has cooked up a batch of home-made BBQ sauce on the last school day of the year. The first year was the spring of 1999, we had moved to a new house in Georgia in the fall of 1998, and Don wanted to start making some new traditions of our own. Thus, the “end of the year BBQ sauce” tradition began.

Tomorrow is the last day of school, and since he’ll be busy making the sauce in the afternoon, we’ll post the recipe for anyone who wants to join in and make their own. It’s a vinegar-based sauce that has a real nice peppery kick to it. We smoked a chicken, chops and a roast last weekend, all part of the plan. Tomorrow night we’ll enjoy some of it with the sauce.

One of our favorite traditions, however, is to thin-slice a fresh loaf of french bread and dip the slices into a bowl of the sauce when it’s fresh out of the pot. Have a beer nearby to cool your palette.

It doesn’t take long to make, it’s pretty simple and doesn’t involve any complex cooking skills. In less than an hour you’ll have your sauce done, but you might want to start a little earlier so you can simmer it a bit longer, allowing the sauce to meld a bit.

Shack Sauce

Wet Stuff

Mix in a large pot:

3 – 24 ounce bottle of ketchup (catsup)
Use the plastic ones, we will refill after making sauce. In fact, save the bottles for the ketchup, mustard and vinegar,

Rinse bottles with hot water, swoosh around and dump contents into bowl.

Pour in plain ole cheap vinegar. “THE” recipe calls for just less than a quart, do not sweat this. use anywhere from a pint to a quart, strangely, this amount has scant effect on final product.

Put the heat on medium to start things warming up.

Dry Stuff

Add to the wet stuff heating up, stir in well. I try to do this before the wet stuff gets too hot so none of it clumps.

1 – 4 ounce can of chili powder
1 – 4 ounce can of black pepper
1 – 4 ounce can of garlic salt (SALT, NOT garlic powder!!!)
1/2 cup – sugar

1 – small Tabasco (anywhere from 1 to 4 ounces..start with about 1 oz…you can ‘play’ to taste after whole mess is completed.
1 – small mustard (size of an apple)

Bring to a boil, then simmer for at least half an hour.  Don’t have it on a high heat for too long, or you’ll burn the bottom.

Remove from heat, pour back into bottles you saved. You will have an excess of sauce. If you plan things well, you’ll have plenty of sauce for your dinner the night you made the sauce, as well as a fresh bowl-full for bread dipping.We hand out bottles of the stuff the day after we make it. We keep ours in the fridge, and always stretch it out so that we finish the last of the sauce just before we make up a new batch. While the sauce smooths out over time, it’s still good after a year in the fridge. The recipe above is a base, we usually make a batch 3 times as large and cook it in a huge stock pot.

Hope you try the sauce and enjoy it. It’s based on a Shack Sauce recipe we got from a fellow sailor years ago. If you make it an annual tradition, you’ll find yourself looking forward to that first piece of bread dipped in the sauce, and will judge future meals as to whether they’re ‘sauceworthy.’