Smokin' Ed's at Smyrna,TN
Absolutely Wild (or Mild) - made in Abilene, Tx
"Last Supper" BBQ sauce at Big Daddy's in Des Moines, IA....my taste buds were numbed with joy for days.
One of my favorite sauces was Texas Best. I say 'was' because I haven't been able to find it in years.
I liked it because it wasn't too sweet, had tang, and was water based. It would thicken and stick to the meat.
I could layer it on. Oil based sauces drip off.
Rudy's BBQ in San Antonio is the best I ever had.
Why Ray? In 1985, Chef Larry, perfected the family recipe and entered his all-natural, sweet and tangy barbecue sauce into the countrys largest rib cookoff. He called it "Sweet Baby Rays," a name his brother, David, got shootin hoops on the west side of Chicago. The sauce is so fine, it beat nearly 700 entries. That was enough proof for the brothers. Larry, David and a high school friend, Mike OBrien, forged a company with a simple philosophy about barbecue. Make it great. So, the rest, as they say, is history. What Happened After winning second prize in the 1985 Mike Royko Riboff they thought, "why not sell this stuff." Sales came from word-of-mouth and cold calls. SBRs experienced steady growth through the years and 1994 took them to the moon. Well, not literally the moon, but all over the Midwest at least. During 1996 through 1999 they were the BBQ Gurus to the Taste of Chicago, (thats 4 million visitors and a ton of napkins). By 1999 sales totaled 500,000 cases. Stacked on top of each other, thats tall. Due to its superior taste, Sweet Baby Rays has become the fastest growing barbecue sauce in the United States. They are currently looking to expand to Atlanta, Arizona and Southern California. And maybe, someday the moon.
Truer words were never spoken.
BBQ Ping
ping... thought you'd get a kick out of this
Okay. Here's the only hot sauce I have cautioned people away from. Some sauces I recommend, some sauces I don't. This sauce I warn against much in the same way I warn against wrestling alligators. This sauce will not only make your meat sprout legs and run away, it will also dissolve your driveway, kill hundred year old oak trees, eat through the refrigerator door and kill all gnats within one square mile. It has the added danger of being spilled in the house. In such case it will create a China Syndrome. But nuclear waste is limeade next to this stuff. My wife didn't know what it was and dripped a normal amount in a bowl of brunswick stew. In the dead of night we had to take the stew two miles away and find a dumpster. Had we done it in the daytime the trail of dead insects would have given us away.:
http://www.sammcgees.com/storegen/C202_278.html
I have to nominate my two favorite sauces for consideration. The first is Bone Suckin' Sauce (thick hot variety) from NC. It is a sweet, hot sauce that tastes so good, no actual meat is required. Just dip your finger in it and suck it off, lather, rinse, repeat.
Also offered for nomination is a local sauce, Hot Chix BBQ sauce from Ellijay, GA. It is a black tangy sauce that absolutely shines for redneck delicacies such as Chorniy Meatballs, you'll note the searing fumes as it reduces and the delightful, complex kick as it coats the lamest of meats in a breastplate of kick f'ing a.
http://www.sonnybryans.com/
The original on Inwood in Dallas is the best.
Angelo's here in Fort Worth is good, but not as good.
Subsitute habenaro for the jalapeno.
Really hate to burst the BBQ bubble because I like BBQ so much.
But a perfectly acceptable BBQ sauce can be made from mixing either Pepsi and catsup or Coca Cola and catsup.
I'm partial to Carolina style, pulled.
"barbecue
1657, from Amer.Sp. barbacoa, from Arawakan (Haiti) barbakoa "framework of sticks," the raised wooden structure the Indians used to either sleep on or cure meat. Originally "meal of roasted meat or fish," modern popular noun sense of "grill for cooking over an open fire" is 1931. "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=b&p=2