Post
by seymour » Thu May 09, 2013 2:49 pm
Hey, my man, good question! I do love me some St. Louis BBQ sauce, but I've never made my own. As your research indicates, it's generally described as heavily tomato paste based and very sweet, nowadays usually with high fructose corn syrup which I try to minimize, so I go out of my way to buy one that uses brown cane sugar instead (What a good boy am I, right? I know, I know, they're all calories...) The best-selling grocery-store brand by far, a St. Louis institution for generations, is Maull's. The bottles are huge, because as your picture indicates, the cooked meat is literally pooled in it. St. Louis natives who live elsewhere always stock-up when they're back in town. Some of the bigger BBQ chain restaurants such as Bandana's also sell their sauce in stores.
A lot of people "doctor it up", for instance my father-in-law always put his meat in big ziploc bags with a bottle of Maull's, a bottle of beer, and sliced oranges, then set aside in the fridge for awhile.
Kansas City, Missouri is famous for their barbeque sauce too. KC Masterpiece is another extremely popular restaurant chain which also sells their sauce in stores.
Of course, the counter-argument is that all this syrupy-sweet sauce simply masks inferior or badly cooked meat. I've heard many barbeque afficionado's complain about St. Louis style, insisting that a good cut of good meat with good dry rub cooked just right is far more sophisticated. Each to their own, I suppose...
