Barbecue Sauce
22 recipes found

Burgoo
If you were to spend some time in Kentucky on Derby Day, or visit at a local restaurant like Shack in the Back BBQ, you’ll likely see people eating burgoo. Burgoo, a cousin of Brunswick stew and Minnesota booya, is a richly layered, slow-cooked stew that usually contains a mix of meats and vegetables such as corn, okra and lima beans, simmered with tomatoes. There’s a saying among “burgoo-masters” that goes,“If it walked, crawled or flew, it goes in burgoo,” and indeed, many traditional versions, cooked over an open fire, have included meats like mutton, squirrel, duck and rabbit. This version uses chicken, pork and beef. Burgoo takes as much effort as you’d imagine, with prep being the biggest hurdle. However, if you set aside a Sunday morning to tackle it, you’ll be rewarded with a rich and flavorful meal that will leave you fulfilled in more ways than one. A pot of burgoo needs just as much room as it needs time to cook, so consider using at least a 9-quart Dutch oven or stock pot for this recipe.

Grape Jelly Meatballs
The ultimate party meatballs, this super-simple dish comes together in the slow cooker, which also keeps it warm for both transporting and for enjoying at your leisure. Traditionally, these are made with frozen meatballs, but this version calls for making your own, using just about any ground meat you like. Crushed red pepper gives these an additional kick, but if you don’t love a spicy meatball, feel free to pull back on the amount. The flavors mellow and combine in the slow cooker, leaving you with a sweet, smoky meatball that’s moist and rich with flavor. Whether for a potluck, holiday or baby shower, this recipe will definitely leave your guests wanting more.

Barbecue Vegetable Salad
This knife-and-fork dinner salad is full of char and crunch, topped off with a festive dressing to incorporate into your summer repertoire. It’s also an ideal way to use up any grillable vegetables. On a verdant bed of Romaine lettuce, kale and cilantro, pile on grilled summer vegetables and peaches and a shower of corn chips. Beans add protein, though you could also top with quinoa, grilled tempeh bacon or another protein. While barbecue sauce doesn’t often coat lettuce, here it becomes a tangy, thick and pleasantly sweet salad dressing with the addition of a little lime juice to loosen and brighten. If you have some ranch in the fridge, drizzle zig-zags of it on top, too; the duo tastes like an herb-flecked Thousand Island dressing. Eat this big salad solo or with a side of cornbread.

Slow-Cooker BBQ Pulled Chicken
This hands-off path to pulled chicken results in a juicy, saucy tangle of meat for a crowd. The combination of boneless chicken thighs and breasts creates a mix of feathery and hearty shreds, while cooking the meat slowly in barbecue sauce ensures it won’t dry out. To emulate some of the smoke and savoriness created by cooking meat over smoldering coals, chipotle chiles in adobo, Worcestershire sauce and onion powder are also added. Serve the pulled chicken between buns with pickles and slaw, or make a barbecue chicken pizza; leftovers keep well for a few days in the fridge.

Oven BBQ Chicken
Lacquered with barbecue sauce, this juicy chicken swaps constant flipping on the grill for a mostly hands-off process using the oven and one smart trick: The dry-rubbed chicken roasts most of the way on top of barbecue sauce. The resulting sauce becomes thickened and glossy from the chicken’s rendered fat. It’s then spooned onto the chicken and roasted until sticky, caramelized and rich with flavor. Serve the extra sauce with dinner, for dipping chicken, or spooning directly into your mouth. (For boneless barbecue chicken, try this stovetop method.)

Oven BBQ Ribs
Oven-baked ribs are a great way to enjoy barbecue flavor without stepping outside. This is a foolproof, supersimple recipe, using seasonings you probably already have in your pantry, plus store-bought barbecue sauce that caramelizes into a sticky-sweet, smoky finish. Instead of using traditional pork ribs, this recipe uses beef back ribs, which are juicier. If you can only find them in chunks, rather than a whole rack, that’s more than OK: Wrap the pieces in aluminum foil, which creates a moist environment that yields fall-off-the-bone meat, and start checking them early. When they start to shrink down and the meat pulls away from the bone with the gentlest tug of a fork, they’re ready.

Salmon With BBQ Sauce and Hot Peppers
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. There are generally a few kinds of barbecue sauce in my refrigerator, leftovers from various experiments. That may be true for you as well? I bet there’s a half-bottle of store-bought sauce, anyway, or a dusty unopened one in the pantry. Check: There probably is. Let’s make dinner with it, and some salmon fillets. Put the barbecue sauce in a small pot on the stove over medium heat, then turn the oven to 400. Roughly chop a few jarred pickled hot peppers into the sauce, and add a couple of pats of butter to silkify the situation. Warm that through while the oven heats, then salt and pepper the salmon fillets and roast them skin-side down, on a lightly oiled sheet pan, for 10 or 12 minutes, or until they are just barely cooked through. Spoon the pepper-studded barbecue sauce over the top, and go to! Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.

Pressure Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork
A pressure cooker provides a nifty shortcut to perfect pulled pork. This recipe calls for braising the meat in a dark soda like Dr Pepper or Coca-Cola, and the results are lush and tender — savory, slightly sweet and tangy. Once the pork is done, you can customize it to your taste using your favorite barbecue and hot sauces. Adding lots of black pepper and a few dashes of Southern-style hot sauce, like Crystal, Louisiana or Tabasco, is a very good idea. Like many braises, the pork improves overnight and can be cooked up to three days in advance; shred and warm it gently on the stovetop before tossing it with sauce and serving. The pork makes satisfying sandwiches on soft rolls (try coleslaw as a topping), but it could also be used in tacos or served over grits. (You can find the slow-cooker version of this recipe here.)

Slow Cooker BBQ Pork and Beans
Pork and beans are cooked together in a slow cooker for mutually beneficial results (If you don't have a slow cooker, you can do it in a pot in the oven.) As the pork shoulder and barbecue sauce braise in the oven, the sauce soaks up the pork juices while the pork tenderizes. Then, beans are added to soak up the deeply concentrated sauce. The recipe uses store-bought barbecue sauce enhanced with the smoky heat of canned chipotles in adobo and brown sugar, which helps glaze the pork. Because every barbecue sauce is different, taste and adjust yours as needed. (For a more acidic sauce, add apple cider vinegar with the beans, or you can increase the sweetness with added sugar.) To serve, slice the pork or shred it into pulled pork.

BBQ Chicken
Barbecued chicken isn’t, really: It’s grilled rather than smoke-roasted at low temperature. But it requires a similar attention to technique. You’ll want to move the pieces around on the grill to keep them from burning, and flip them often as well. Cooking barbecued chicken benefits from a basting technique used by the chef and outdoor cooking maven Adam Perry Lang, who thins out his sauce with water, then paints it onto the meat he’s cooking coat after coat, allowing it to reduce and intensify rather than seize up and burn.

Folami’s BBQ Tofu
Kwanzaa gatherings continue to go strong in community centers and at home in dining rooms, as they have since 1966. The seven-day holiday of self-reflection, often an extension of Christmas or the winter solstice, culminates with the karamu, or feast. The spread leans heavily vegetarian. In Atlanta, Folami Prescott-Adams dries, seasons, fries and broils pounds of tofu. Store-bought, tomato-based barbecue sauce provides the comfort factor. She is a 40-year veteran of Kwanzaa and maintains a spreadsheet of potluck logistics for her family and guests. Alongside this vegetarian barbecue, Dr. Prescott-Adams’s buffet feeds more than 100 people, and the greatest hits include macaroni and cheese, red punch and black-eyed peas.

Roasted Potato Salad With BBQ Dressing
If barbecue potato chips were a salad, then this would be it. It’s hard to pick which component of this picnic dish is the greater star: the crispy roasted potatoes or the smoky, paprika-tinged barbecue sauce dressing. Bejeweled with crunchy red onions, which are soaked in water to mellow their bite, and showered with fresh dill, this colorful side dish is the savory crowd-pleaser you’ll want to bring to any cookout or potluck.

Grilled Turkey Burgers
There are a couple steps to ensure a crisp on the outside, juicy on the inside and all around delicious grilled turkey burger. Grated onion and barbecue sauce give the patties savoriness and provide additional moisture, so they don’t dry out from the high heat of the grill. Coating the patties in a mixture of barbecue sauce and mayonnaise guarantees a seared and glazed exterior. If you’d like to turn these into cheeseburgers, simply drape sliced cheese — preferably Cheddar or pepper Jack — over the patties in the last two minutes of grilling and cover the grill.

BBQ Chicken Pizza
This simple recipe celebrates a 1980s classic invented by the American pizza genius Ed LaDou (whose fingerprints are also on Wolfgang Puck’s famous smoked-salmon pizza). The pizza matches the flavors of chicken with barbecue sauce, red onion, two kinds of cheese and a little cilantro. Use homemade dough and barbecue sauce, cook it in the hottest setting of your oven, and the classic pie goes from good to great. Want to make the recipe vegetarian? Simply substitute mushrooms for the chicken and sauté until most of their moisture is evaporated.

Turkey BBQ Sandwiches With Pickles and Slaw
Most turkey sandwiches are best made with slices of white meat stacked neatly between two slices of bread. Not this one. With a saucy, spicy filling piled onto a hamburger bun, it’s perfect for dark meat and any scraps you may have leftover from the carcass. The cabbage slaw adds crispness and tang to the soft turkey, and bread-and-butter pickles give the sandwich a touch of sweetness. If you don’t have leftover turkey in your refrigerator, this recipe works just as well with the meat torn off a rotisserie chicken.

Shredded Roast Duck
Some say roasting a duck is difficult work. It is not. It can be messy, though, so make sure you have a roasting pan that can accommodate the enormous amount that renders out of the bird during its roughly four and a half hours in the oven. (Save it for roasting potatoes!) When the meat has cooked, use a couple of forks to shred it, then moisten it with your favorite barbecue sauce, hoisin sauce, gochujang sauce or gravy, and serve with rice or noodles, on potato rolls or Chinese wheat-flour pancakes, or as the final topping of this maniacal recipe for scallops with hollandaise sauce and shredded duck.

One-Pot BBQ Pork and Beans
Two beloved barbecue staples are cooked together in one pot (or a slow cooker) for mutually beneficial results. As the pork shoulder braises, the pork juices flavor the barbecue sauce and the sauce tenderizes the pork. Beans are then added to soak up the deeply concentrated sauce. The recipe uses store-bought barbecue sauce enhanced with the smoky heat of canned chipotles in adobo and brown sugar, which helps glaze the pork. Because every barbecue sauce is different, taste and adjust yours as needed. (To mimic a North Carolina-style sauce, add apple cider vinegar with the beans, or yellow mustard for a South Carolina-style sauce, or even gochujang and soy sauce for a Korean-inspired take.) To serve, slice the pork or shred it into pulled pork. Cornbread, biscuits or Texas toast are great additions.

Oven-Barbecued Pimentón Brisket

BBQ Chicken and Mushroom Tostadas
This recipe offers a novel way to create chips. When corn tortillas are toasted in the oven, they get hard, not crispy. When they are toasted in the microwave, they get that crispy snap. This method requires a little patience: Zap a tortilla for a minute and it will be soggy, even wet, on the bottom. Flip it over and zap it again, and all the moisture will be gone. Sometimes it takes a few turns, as every microwave is different. Watch closely, though, as they tortillas burn quickly once dry.

Roasted Herbed Baby Chickens With Spicy Mango Barbecue Sauce

Show-Me Bar-B-Q Meat Loaf
