There’s a little history to my sauce. For years I haven’t been able to eat tomatoes without repercussions. So I figured I would need to find a way to have bbq my way. I’ve reached the 5th version of my sauce. All of them were good (or ok), but there is always room for improvement.
Ingredients:
1 cup apple juice
3 cup Dr Pepper
2 dried Guajillo peppers (flavor)
2 dried New Mexico peppers (flavor)
4 dried Arbol peppers (hot)
1 tsp Smoked Chipotle pepper powder (add more if you like chipotle)
1 tsp molasses
1 packet Sazon (Goya)
16 oz Strawberry Jam
16 oz Raspberry perserves
Let’s unpack these ingredients a little bit. I’ll start with the jams/jellies. This is the whole reason for my madness. I had to make a sauce that did not have a tomato base. I originally started with just strawberry jam. I knew it wouldn’t be quite right, but I wanted to start as simple as possible and only add complexity when I need to. I really don’t want to make something with a difficult recipe. If you use only strawberry jam the sauce is gonna taste like strawberries. Strawberries are good, but I don’t want my ribs to taste like them. I use a couple of different jams mixed together (among other ingredients); strawberry and raspberry are a good start. If you can find guava jelly for a good price use that too, but I usually skip it because of the cost.
Next, all those peppers and powder. I like chipotle peppers, but those are not always available in my local grocery, so I have to settle for the powdered form. I’m also adding some other peppers in as well because I don’t want this sauce to only hit one note. Guajillo peppers smell so good and they bring lots of flavor without any heat. The arbol peppers are just for heat, use less if you don’t want the heat, use more if you do.
The Sazon (Goya) is actually a replacement for the salt. It’s a flavor enhancer in itself and anyone who has cooked with it before will know why I added it. It’s MSG… which is a kind of salt; the S stands for sodium and that means salt. That MSG headache you’ve heard about is a myth created to give Chinese restaurants a bad name (even though Chinese restaurants never even used it until after the myth was created).
All the rest of the ingredients (Dr pepper, apple juice, and molasses) are pretty standard fare in the BBQ world. They bring some of that familiar flavor to the party. The sauce will need some kind of liquid anyway so why not use Dr pepper instead of just water? I know, right.
Let’s get started cooking. I have found that the order in which you cook all this does matter because you need to strain out the seeds from the jams and if you wait too long to strain then it will get thick and you’re gonna have a bad day trying to strain seeds out of a thick sauce.
Step one:
Heat up the apple juice and the Dr Pepper in a pot and begin prepping the peppers. Don’t boil the liquid, just simmer. Every pepper will be full of seeds and we don’t actually want the seeds unless you want it to be so hot that your wife can’t even think about eating your ribs… some of you might want to keep them all to yourselves, but I like to share. So we need to cut strips of the peppers and dump all the seeds out. Then all the peppers and seasonings (chipotle, sazon, and molasses) can go into the Dr Pepper juice as it simmers. If you can’t find the exact peppers I use, don’t worry, just use a little bit of any hot peppers and a lot more of whichever flavorful peppers you can find. They will probably tell you how hot they are on the packaging; mild equals flavor.
This step can take about an hour; all we are looking for is to get as much flavor out of the peppers as we can. After this is ready we need to drain the peppers out and put it back on the heat and on to step two.
Step two:
Now to add the jams. Put the jams and any ingredients that you may have forgot into the pot. Once again for those in the back, at this point everything should be in the pot. Once the jams have melted all the way through it’s time to strain the raspberry seeds and any berry parts from the jam. There is going to be probably more than you might expect, just strain it all out. You have to do it before the sauce thickens or else you will be there all day trying to get it strained. We want every bit of seeds and jam stuff out so you won’t have any problem with the sauce squeezing out through the nozzle of your container.
Step three:
Once everything is strained for the second (and last) time and all the seeds and chucks are out then you can let it simmer down and reduce until it thickens. We want to get the sauce just above our desired thickness. The reason we want it to be just above is because as it cools it will thicken even more.
If you cooked your sauce too long and it gets too thick, that’s ok. Just ad a bit more apple juice, or Dr pepper, or even water if the flavor is already just right and you don’t want to mess it up. Put in a little bit at a time, close the lid, and shake it up. You can do this as many times as it takes; it’s always better to take small step when thinning it out so you don’t accidentally make it too thin.
If your sauce got way too thick and you can’t even shake it in the bottle, then put it all back into a pot and warm it up again. Once it’s warm you should be able to thin it out easier.
I use this sauce primarily on pork ribs, but I have to admit that I sometimes put a little on a bagel and cream cheese with some green onions; it’s really good.
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