Your Store-Bought BBQ Sauce Could Be So Much Better With This Sweet, Fruity Ingredient - Tasting Table

"Convenient at a pinch and good for hints of smoke in your cooking, but store-bought BBQ definitely couldn't hold a candle to homemade. If you've ever tasted genuine, made-from-scratch BBQ sauce, you'll find the grocery store version to be a lot more toned down and lack some characters to it. Good news: you don't have to use sad, weakly-flavored sauce. It could be much, much tastier with the addition of one ingredient: jam."

"You heard that right, if you like your pulled pork on the sweet and vibrant side, try stirring a little bit of jam into your BBQ sauce - tomato or mustard-based will work best, as they give the jam a tangy base to work with, but really, any should work fine. That also goes for the jam. Really, the only limits are either what you have in your pantry right now and what you like."

Store-bought BBQ sauces are often toned down and lack character compared with homemade versions. A small amount of jam stirred into BBQ sauce increases sweetness, tang, and overall flavor complexity. Tomato- or mustard-based sauces provide a particularly good tangy base for jams, though any jam can work. Orange marmalade contributes sweet, tangy citrus notes, while peach preserves add pronounced sweetness. Fruit-preserve–enriched BBQ sauce functions as a sweet, smoky glaze for roasted leg of lamb, a substitute for honey glazes on duck breast, and a flavorful finishing sauce for barbecued ribs and other meats.

Read at Tasting Table