Sweet and Spicy Super Thick BBQ Sauce

I went to a BBQ/Solstice/Bonfire this past weekend. It was potluck and other folks were already bringing amazing meats and libations. One guy built a smoker on site for brisket, salmon, and the best smoked pork loin I've ever tasted. I was already bringing cold noodles with peanut sauce, but I felt the need to experiment and hopefully impress.

I figured it was time to make my own BBQ sauce. If you think BBQ sauce is easier to just purchase, please stay with me here. There are some amazing off-the-shelf sauces, no doubt about it. Bone
Suckin Sauce and pretty much the entire Dinosaur line come to mind right away.  However, I'm a lot more focused on making it than finding it. At least for me, personalizing the recipe is part of the fun.

Anyone who has been following me at all knows that while I like high quality, I'm not into pricey for the sake of pricey. Is Grey Goose higher quality than Nikolai? Of course it is. However, if I'm using it to clean my shaving razor or adding a couple spoonfuls to a sauce that yields 4 cups, I'll go with cheaper. So when I decided I was making a pile of BBQ sauce, I started with good old fashioned Hunt's-from-the-discount-store ketchup and went from there.

We could spend weeks going through the coarse and fine distinctions of regional sauce types, but the best classifier I can give you on my creation is that it falls somewhere in Tomato and Vinegar variety, but with little East Asian umami thrown in there. Think Memphis, Tennessee by way of Tokyo. What can I say? I like it when folks refer to it as my sauce, not the sauce. A nod to my time in Maui, here: my mouth remembers eating Katsu for lunch and the tart sauce that came with it, so that's what I went after. The result was a Katsu BBQ fusion that went over better than I could have hoped.

The jar was full when I brought it up. It wasn't the only sauce available, but I might have been the only person to try the other ones. Of course, I shamelessly self-promoted and forced everyone to sample my stuff. Recipe below:

2 Cups Ketchup

3/4 Cup Worcestershire Sauce

1/4 Cup Soy Sauce (I prefer full sodium)

1/4 Cup Rice Vinegar

1/4 Cup Unfiltered Apple Cider Vinegar

6 TBSP Raw or Brown Sugar

6 TBSP Spicy Brown Mustard

1 TBSP Granulated Garlic

1 TBSP Chopped Onion (dried)

1 TBSP Crushed Red Pepper

3 TBSP Potato starch

1. In a saucepan over medium heat, combine all wet ingredients with the mustard and sugar. Bring to a light simmer, stirring occasionally.
2. Whisk in Garlic and Red Pepper. Taste. Add more Garlic or Pepper if desired Be aware that these flavors grow a bit as the sauce sits in the fridge.
3. Return to simmer. 
4. Gradually whisk in Potato Starch, breaking up any clumps that form. 
5. Pour chopped onion into the container you plan to store the sauce in.
6. Remove from heat, pour into storage/serving container, and refrigerate.

I added a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Pepper to the jar, and warned everyone not to eat it, but that's just my own touch of fire, not a necessary component to the sauce. The potato starch thickened all that liquid well without the need to reduce the mixture. I was planning on people slathering sauce onto their food, so I wanted to keep the volume and the thickness.