Best BBQ Sauce for 2022
Just because grilling season is over doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep adding barbecue flavor to your food. After all, you don’t have to take barbecue off the menu just because the temperature drops. If you’re willing to brave the cold, you can enjoy barbecuing all year round, especially if you keep well stocked with a few delicious bottles of barbecue sauce. So put on your snow boots, open up those bad boys and turn on the grill or smoker. Everything tastes better when you use the best sauces 2022 has to offer.
When you find the perfect barbecue sauce, the options are many. You will find dozens of hot and sweet sauces on the market and many more are available online from small producers. To find the best barbecue sauce for 2022, I grilled, squeezed and licked my fingers during a storm. I personally collected 15 bottles of sweet, spicy, smoky, and vinegary sauces with several barbecue-loving friends for the ultimate sauce showdown.
A quick note: In the north, the sweeter varieties dominate the sauce market, but my tasters and I all enjoy vinegar-based sauces, so we’ve included several Carolina BBQ sauces (among other styles) to make this list as inclusive and unbiased as possible. .
What makes a good barbecue sauce?
It’s all relative, but most pitmasters agree that balance is the key to good barbecue sauce. Most sauces are made with a tomato base, vinegar, a sweetener like honey or molasses, and a hot ingredient. From there, the sauces are refined with spices and flavors, such as mustard, garlic, fruit and smoke. Any sauce that’s too overwhelming in one direction usually doesn’t work well. And super simple sauces without too much spice or complexity often fall flat.
We’ve sampled many traditional Kansas City style sauces for this list, a slew of high vinegar Carolina style sauces, keto friendly sauces, Bachan’s cult Japanese style sauce, and a few Alabama white sauces. to see which ones really tickled. our taste buds. We tried each with plain unseasoned chicken breast, as it’s a pretty blank slate as far as classic grilled foods go. When tasting, we noted things like overall balance, warmth, sweetness, overpowering flavors, or anything else that jumped out – both bad and good.
It took a lot of napkins to find the best barbecue sauce in 2022. Here they are.
Full moon
Full Moon is a regional chain of barbecue restaurants in Alabama and Mississippi that has been in business since 1986. You probably won’t find Full Moon’s amazing sauce on store shelves, but it can be purchased online for just $7. $.49 a bottle. Thank goodness for this classic style sauce has a near perfect balance of sweetness, smoke, heat and spice.
Stubb’s
If you prefer to pick up your barbecue sauce at the store, Stubb’s products can be found in most supermarkets and are a great alternative to Full Moon. Like the winner above, Stubb’s has a good balance without any flavor taking over. This one is thick but not gooey and gets its sweetness from brown sugar (not corn syrup) with a nice kick from lots of black pepper.
by Bachan
I’ve been on the Bachan bandwagon for quite some time now and I have no intention of getting out of it. Bachan’s is atypical of classic barbecue sauces in that it is laced with Japanese flavors, giving it a huge umami punch. You will immediately notice the soy sauce, accompanied by sesame, ginger and a delicate sweetness. This is one of the thinner sauces, so it may not stick to ribs and chicken as well or caramelize as others, so it’s probably best used as a finishing sauce.
Bachan’s is also pricey at $13 for a bottle, but snag two and the price drops to $12 each. (Trust me, you’ll want more than one bottle.)
Caroline Q’
This rich, dark and smoky sauce is made by a small producer in North Carolina. It’s probably the tastiest sauce we’ve tried, with great sweetness that’s cut with rich, smoky hickory and lots of heat. There’s a lot going on here, but it all comes together well to create a very flavorful sauce.
Bull’s-eye
At less than $3 a bottle, it was a favorite of the “cheap” BBQ sauces, and it’s the one you’ll easily find at most grocery stores or on Amazon. Bull’s-Eye has a killer sweetness but achieves a great balance of mustard, garlic and natural hickory smoke. If you go by the sauce like water, this is a great stocking sauce for ribs, chicken, and burgers.
Texas Pete
If you’re a hot sauce junkie looking for a barbecue sauce, Texas Pete’s Eastern Carolina Sauce is the one for you. Texas Pete is a hot sauce maker, first and foremost, and so this high-vinegar Carolina-style sauce tastes a bit like hot sauce, but with a subtle sweetness and tomato flavor. It’s made with just five ingredients and no corn syrup. At 15 calories per serving, it’s probably the “healthiest” barbecue sauce on this list.
Sweet Baby Ray’s
I’ll be honest, it wasn’t one of my personal favorites, but some of the other tasters with a fondness for sweeter foods were really into it. Sweet Baby Ray’s (hey, it’s right there in the name) is made with corn syrup and pineapple juice and is so sweet it can be overwhelming. It’s also rather thick, almost like barbecue jam or jelly. If you’re a barbecue lover with a sweet tooth, this is the sauce for you. Plus, it’s inexpensive at just $2 a bottle.
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Other BBQ Sauces We Tried That Didn’t Work
- Full Moon Alabama White Sauce: This sauce was positively addictive, but it might be an overstatement to call it barbecue sauce. I know Alabamans might not like to hear this, but Full Moon White Sauce is more like a really rich and flavorful ranch with lots of mustard, garlic and Worcestershire.
- Jack Daniels Original BBQ Sauce: This is another one that we all really liked. It has nice balance and strong spice, but eventually some of the others just pushed it off the top.
- Haven’s Kitchen Zesty BBQ Sauce: This sauce has a nice complex flavor but a bit too much vinegar punch for us. If you like really hot sauces, this might be a good choice. It’s also sold out at the moment, which makes it a bit difficult to get your hands on if you’re ordering online.
- Good for Food Keto BBQ Sauce: With only 10 calories and 3 grams of carbs per serving, this sauce was definitely edible, but not one of our favorites.
- Kraft Original BBQ Sauce: This one had very little dimension and was more like lightly smoked ketchup than a good BBQ sauce.
- Heinz Carolina Vinegar BBQ Sauce: This sauce wasn’t terrible but had too much vinegar for most of us.
- Caroline Heinz Mustard Sauce: It looked more like honey mustard than barbecue sauce. Not bad, but did not meet our requirements for this round of testing.
- Kings Delight Bar-B-Que Sauce: This Carolina-style sauce is flavorful but with so much vinegar, it’s less of a traditional BBQ sauce and more of a thin finishing sauce for pulled pork.
More of our backyard barbecue favorites
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