Black Tar BBQ
First published to SFHouseMouse.com on 4/25/2016
A dear friend asked me to write out this recipe, so I have, but y'all will have to bear with me; though cooking might be a forte, writing out the formula is not—especially with BBQ sauce! For something like this, you've just gotta trust your taste buds.
Pictured above is about everything I used to conjure this magical potion (and it was magical).
I started by rendering, in a thick-bottomed sauce pan, four thick slices of Trader Joe's maplewood smoked bacon that had been diced as lardons.
When the fat was sufficiently rendered, I added a scant cup of brunoised shallot (really you could use any onion, but I like the mild, yet also somehow powerful, shallot).
Once the shallots had turned from opaque to clear-ish and glossy (once they had sweat), I tossed in 5-6 cloves of minced garlic and cooked until the aroma filled the house. All of this was prepared on a lower heat to ensure the gentle caramelization, not the scorching, of the sugars in the ingredients.
Now that the neighbor's appetites were properly piqued, I deglazed the pan with close to half the bottle of Four Roses Bourbon. *When cooking with alcohol, I like to use a booze that I would gladly drink, but not one that I'm overly excited to open—if ya know what I mean.*
Let the Bourbon reduce down about half way. All of the alcohol will burn off, and you'll be left with a smokey sweetness that is such a beautiful compliment to the bacon.
Next, add your preferred jar of jam. This recipe used a homemade plum jam I had been hanging on to for about five years, waiting for just such an occasion! In this case it was a pint of plum jam, but blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, or cherry—even apricot—would all work well.
Add around a cup of catsup for this ratio of ingredients, and a healthy few glugs of molasses on a warm day.
I also did about five solid dashes of Worcestershire sauce, a heavy dusting of smoked paprika, a little cayenne, about two tablespoons of dijon, and salt to taste.
Once that was all thoroughly mixed up, I thinned the lot with apple cider vinegar and let barely simmer.
Finally, I had roasted a chicken rubbed with a BBQ dry rub, and when that dirty bird was done, I threw the sauce in the roasting pan to mix in all the drippings.
Voila! The results were insanely scrumptious. We ended up eating the stew-like sauce by the spoonful straight out of the pan!
As with all my recipes, they are meant to be used as guidelines, not rules. If you don't have, or don't like, some of the ingredients included, don't use them. This recipe could be modified in a hundred different ways, and all would be delicious! If I were using apricot jam, for instance (instead of a dark fruit jam) I might used honey instead of molasses, skip the catsup and paprika, and add jalapeno and five-spice.
And, taste your work at almost every step of the process so you know better what direction you want to take your finished product.
In fact, if you come up with an amazing alteration, let us know! Leave a comment on what you did differently, and how things turned out for you.
<3 Eat what you Love, and Love what you Eat <3