How A Chef Makes Store-Bought Barbecue Sauce Taste Homemade

Barbecue sauce is one of those things that seems like it's going to be super simple to make at home before you find yourself up to your eyeballs in sticky, single-purpose ingredients and measuring spoons. Sure, it reduces on the stove pretty quickly, but the molasses-coated road to successfully simmering a batch is long. That's why, in the case of meat's ideal condiment, a store-bought sauce is, as they say, fine. But there are still some ways to dress up the shelf-stable stuff. Rich Parente, chef and owner of Clock Tower Grill in Brewster, New York, shared his tip for improving store-bought barbecue sauce exclusively with Chowhound. 

"If you want to improve store-bought barbecue sauce, taste it first to see what it needs," Parente says. "If it's not sweet enough, add some brown sugar. If it needs some extra tartness, add cider vinegar (the cidery flavor goes better with barbecue compared to red wine vinegar and other styles)."

This easy bit of advice is so close to what you'd do if when making your own batch you can almost imagine you'd whipped it up yourself. Just be sure to blend any additional ingredients together as needed to fully incorporate them. And you can always get a little creative — the barbecue sauce of today looks a lot different than it used to, after all.

When it comes to choosing the best store-bought stuff to zhuzh up, Rich Parente recommends what ultimately amounts to trial and error in your sauce-seeking mission. "Finding a good store-bought barbecue sauce is all about personal taste and knowing that different styles of barbecue have their own kind of sauce," he says. And, with such a wide variety of mass market and artisan options, it might just take you many meaty meals to land on a favorite. 

If you're not sure which bottle to begin with, you can get a head start with a couple of Parente's easily found recommendations. "Open Pit barbecue, for example, tends to be best with a more acidic, vinegary sauce," he says. "For a specific store-bought sauce, I personally like Sweet Baby Ray's, and its richer, thicker profile goes great with ribs and brisket." Chowhound writer Katie Melynn has also put together a ranking of popular barbecue sauces on Amazon (it should come as no surprise that a beloved staple like Sweet Baby Ray's made the cut). 

Whether you're oven-baking those ribs or tossing a rack on the gas grill, remember that low and slow is key to achieving an optimally tender finish. And the same goes for brisket. Because the heat and the meat passively do a lot of the work in either case, you can make classic barbecue sides like a crisp-edged skillet cornbread and coleslaw, which is easy to upgrade, to go with your well-sauced meat.