Our Favorite Barbeque Sauce

I love barbeque sauce.   Sweet and sticky meat is the best meat of all.   I love it.

So I was thrilled when I got a slab of ribs for cheap...well, cheaper than usual... and wanted to have it with some homemade barbeque sauce and then Claire hopped on my Pinterest food board and found this recipe for Brown Sugar Barbecue Sauce.   We tried it and loved it.  

Tip, via my fabulous sister:   Wrap the ribs in foil and cook them on low in your crockpot all day.   By dinnertime, the meat will be falling off the bones and all you have to do is slather it with sauce and pop it in the broiler to caramelize the sauce a bit. To. Die. For.  Or you can serve the sauce on the side.   Or both!     The same technique works for frozen chops as well.   Easy squeezy!

I love this sauce so much that I multiplied the recipe by a lot and canned it so we'd always have it on hand.   Here is the expanded recipe.  Enough for your own pantry and gifts as well.

Robin's Favorite Barbeque Sauce
www.rurification.com

7 1/2 cups brown sugar
6 1/2 cups ketchup
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup worcestershire sauce
3 rounded tablespoons mustard powder
3 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons paprika [smoked paprika is really good, too!]
3 tablespoons black pepper
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon garlic powder  or 1 entire head of garlic, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon onion powder  or 2 onions, minced
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes


Mix all ingredients together in a large pot and bring to boil.   Ladle into clean jars; cover with lids and rings and process for canning. 

Makes 8 pints of sauce.  Perfect for giving as gifts. 

Autumn Olive Plum Chutney

A lot of you have never heard of autumn olive - also called Elaeagnus Umbellata - so check out my posts here  and here for the details.

We have a bunch of these - the thornless kind - and it's harvest time!   In no time flat we had a full gallon of berries.   These babies have a big seed in them so the first thing you do is cook them down and take the seeds out.   The first link above shows you how.

You'll get half as much sauce as berries.   We had 2 quarts of sauce when I was done, which was plenty for a batch of jam and some left over to experiment with.    I thought it would make a nice chutney paired with a few plums and this is what I did. 

Note: I was surprised to discover that this sauce tastes a lot like tomatoes, especially before you add the cloves. As in – everyone who tasted it said – “Did you put tomatoes in this? Are you sure?” If you want to see, then leave the cloves out until the very end of the cooking time. Autumn Olive and tomatoes are very high in lycopene, which contributes to their red color. It’s possible that has something to do with the taste thing.

This is a terrific barbeque sauce for your favorite grilled meat.    Terrific!   Mmmm.







Autumn Olive Plum Chutney

• 2 cups autumn olive sauce [from 4 cups berries]
• 2 cups chopped plums
• 1 tablespoon mustard seed
• 1 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
• 2 1/2 cups sugar 
• 1/4 cup vinegar
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped candied ginger
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1/3 cup raisins
• 1/2 rounded teaspoon ground cloves

Combine ingredients and cook slowly over medium heat. This will get very, very thick, so feel free to add water [or juice] to bring it to the consistency that you want. With no added water, this makes 2 pints. When this stuff cools, it is molto thicko. [I just made that up.]  It takes at least a pint of liquid to bring it to a thick barbeque sauce consistency.

All of which means that you can put it up in smaller bottles, then when you need it, add half as much water for an easily spreadable sauce, and equal parts water for a pourable sauce.  

Mango Season!

As I was writing things up for this week, I realized that I've got a whole lot of stuff coming up to do with mangoes.  It's mango season!

It's easy to find beautiful mangoes at your local store these days and there are loads of things to do with them.   Check out yesterday's post for an easy way to cut a mango up into small pieces without shooting it across the room like a bar of wet soap. 


Today I've got a recipe for a Mango Sauce that is so good, it makes a terrific summer soup.

The family did not share my soup enthusiasm.  They liked it as a cool sauce over squash fritters.

I liked it in a bowl with a spoon.  

You can eat it however you want.

Mango Curry Sauce [Soup]

• 1 large mango cut up
• 1/2 cup yogurt
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon red curry paste
• a handful of fresh cilantro chopped finely

Blend all ingredients together in a food processor.   Serve at room temperature.  Refrigerate leftovers.   [Not that there will be any.]

Plum Sauce

We eat a lot of plum sauce, or any variation thereof, whenever we make eggrolls.

But it gets expensive to buy those cute little bottles - even if the bottles are really cute and I can use them again for other stuff. 

So I decided to make my own.  [My own plum sauce.  Not my own bottles.]  It's easier than I thought to make it myself.

Really.

First I bought some plums at Sam's and then they got lost in the fridge.

I hate that.

When I found them, some of them had soft spots.   The kind of soft spots that aren't really fun to eat fresh, but that are just perfect in jam and plum sauce.

I peeled and chopped and cooked up the plums and made Pear-Plum Vanilla Jam with half of them and used the rest for plum sauce.   [More on that Pear-Plum Vanilla Jam later...]

I had about 3 cups of cooked plums left over for the plum sauce. 

Here's how it went...

Plum Sauce

• 3 cups cooked plums [That's about 3 large plums or 4-5 small ones]
• 1  1/2 Tablespoons Ball Low-Sugar Pectin powder

In saucepan, combine the plum goo and pectin and heat until it boils hard.   Be patient.  It's worth it.  Boil hard for 1 minute.  

• 1/4 cup minced onion
• 1 Tablespoon minced fresh ginger or pickled ginger
• 4 medium cloves garlic, minced
• 2 Tablespoons olive oil

In another pot, combine the above ingredients and cook just until tender.   You're trying to mellow them, not caramelize them.

When the plums have boiled hard for a minute, put them in the large pot with the onions and stuff.  Return to boil.   Then add: 

• 3 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup blackberry syrup [or other red juice for color because my plums were beige]
• 1 Tablespoon red pepper flakes

Heat this until it boils hard.   Be patient.  Let it get good and hot all the way through.   Keep stirring and stirring and when it's boiling so hard that you can't stir it down and it's singing to you, then add:

• 1/2 cup vinegar

Combine well.   Let it all get good and hot again.    Ladle into jars.   Process for canning.   Makes 5 cups of truly excellent plum sauce.


Troubleshooting:
Cooking the plums:   Peel and chop them up into chunks.   Don't stress out about the size of the chunks.   They fall apart when they cook.   Put them into a small saucepan and put about 1/2 cup of water in there.   You don't want too much water, but you don't want them to stick either and you won't have time to stir them constantly because now you're going to go mince the onion and garlic and stuff.   Add more water if you need to.   It'll be fine. 

Plums:  Let's say that you can't find any fresh plums worth eating at the store right now.   Don't worry.  You can use a large can of plums from the store.  Get one without sugar if possible.

Plums in syrup:  Let's say that you can't find a can of plums without sugar.   Don't worry.   This is what you do:

• Instead of dissolving your pectin in with the plums, dissolve the pectin into 1 1/2 cups of plain old water.   Or plain new water.   Water.   Whatever. 
• Boil the water and pectin hard.
• When it has boiled hard for a minute, put the can of plums in there too and return it all to a boil.  Then put it in the bigger pan with the onions and stuff and boil it again.  [You don't have to boil it hard this time.]
• Add the rest of the sugar MINUS a cup.   [You already have sugar in the can of plums, so you can cut some of the extra sugar we add to the sauce out.  Make sense?]  
• Follow the rest of the recipe as it is above.    

Your sauce should be just fabulous.   Have an extra eggroll for me!

Blackberry Barbeque Sauce

Remember what I said the other day about desperation?

Desperation makes me creative.

I had a lot of blackberries I needed to use.    I was desperate to use them.   Desperate I tell you.

But not in jelly.   And not in syrup.  And not in bags of mixed berries in the freezer for pies later.

Even though I love blackberry jelly and syrup and bags of mixed berries in the freezer for pies later, I have enough.  

Enough is enough. 

So I really, really needed to find something else to do with more blackberries. I was desperate.  Before they took over the house.  And desperation resulted in creativity.

And creativity resulted in Blackberry Barbeque Sauce.     It's delicious.   As a bonus, it used up some cans of diced tomatoes I had in the pantry.   Here's the recipe:

Blackberry Barbeque Sauce

• 2 cans diced tomatoes 
• 2 large cloves garlic
• 1 small-medium onion, diced
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 4 cups blackberry juice
• 1 cup  white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp molasses
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 tsp mustard powder
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice
• 1 TB salt

Heat the tomatoes, onion and garlic until soft.   Puree in blender.   Put back into wide bottom pot.  Combine the rest of the ingredients in the pot and simmer until reduced by half.    Adjust spices to taste.  Makes 6 1/2 cups. 

Notes:

• Blackberry juice:   Cook the blackberries with a bit of water [so they don't stick to the pot].   Mash.  Strain seeds and skins out.    I line my chinois [colander, sieve, strainer] with cheesecloth, put the mash in, and squeeze the juice out. 
• Consistency:  We like it on the thin side.  If you want it thicker, cook it longer. 
• You can halve the recipe if you need to.