I'm making ribs for dinner tomorrow, and I bought a couple bottles of BBQ sauce to go on them while they cook in the crock pot. I've been wanting to make my own sauce, though, as I'm sure it will probably taste a little better than any of the bottled stuff. Does anybody have anything they've tried that turned out really nice, or have any brands of BBQ sauce that taste particularly good?

I have always been a fan of Sweet Baby Ray's, it has quite a bit of sugar though. I have never had any succes with a homemade BBQ sauce. If I want to try something new I usually look for something with less sugar/more tomato base.

Ditto

Sweet Baby Ray's is good... however, my favorite is Famous Dave's (Rich and Sassy). Excellent BBQ sauce.

The girls in the house like Sweet Baby Rays, as well as Jack Daniels Hickory (yes, I know I said they don't like smoke ... don't ask).

Pretty much every bottled BBQ sauce I've ever eaten tastes to me like a smoky form of molasses or brown sugar syrup. *blech* far too sweet for me.

My go to sauce for pulled pork is a South Carolina style mustard sauce. The recipe I use is:

4 parts mustard
2 parts vinegar
1 part honey
1 part brown sugar
few dashes hot sauce
S&P to taste

My hot sauce of choice is always Franks, and my "few dashes" ends up being "A lot of dashes".

Another sauce that I've really fallen in love with is the Apple City BBQ recipe that I got from the book, "Peace, Love, and BBQ" (absolutely FANTASTIC read if you've got any interest in BBQ, BTW). That recipe can be found at: http://bbq.about.com/od/barbecuesaucerecipes/r/bl50617c.htm

Those are the 2 sauces I always have on hand (although used the last of the mustard last night...eeek!) I really haven't felt the need to branch out much. One is a great semi-sweet tomato based, the other is a fantastic mustard based. Occasionally I'll make a NC style vinegar sauce, but those aren't my fave at all. Both of these are infinitely better than anything I've gotten out of a bottle.

Also if you want to play around with sauce recipes every sauce is pretty much a balance of tart (vinegar/mustard), sweet (brown sugar, honey, ketchup, jellies), and spice (chipotle, cayenne, hot sauce, etc). Other flavors that work well in sauces, IMO, are fruits (use a good jelly to add fruit and some sweetness). Obviously mustard & ketchup, but don't forget they'll add tang/sweet as well as their base flavors. Smoke is a good addition, but I really don't like liquid smoke. If I want smoke I'll use Chipotles for the heat component...or I'll do my sauce cooking on the grill to get some smoke flavor to it.

Sauce is fun, you can pretty much tweak and play with it how you like, and come up with something new and original! And if you don't like it, the ingredients are mostly pretty cheap! I've experimented with quite a few sauces, though, and the 2 above are my faves. I've worked on a raspberry chipotle in the past, and haven't quite got it hammered out to perfection...may need to retry that one again and tweak it some more

Try this one for chicken.

It's really famous at chicken barbecues in Western NY, and it's delicious.

You can actually marinate the chicken in it first. It doesn't burn, so brushing on the chicken copiously as it cooks improves the flavor.

Cornell Barbecue Sauce

I've been wanting to try some of this: Jolokia BBQ 10

Nice. I've been wanting to figure out some bbq sauce recipes. I like Sweet Baby Ray's too but I try to stay away from high fructose corn syrup whenever I can, so Bullseye is what I've been using lately. Where's the best place to find chipotle's anyway?

Would it be too flippant to say the mexican aisle of your local grocery store?

I know we carry dried peppers in the produce section at Walmart. We only have Guajillo peppers now, but we did also carry New Mexico peppers and Japones peppers. We may get them back in again.

As for the Mexican aisle, I know at Walmart we have a lot of taco shells, tortillas, salsas, seasonings, and some canned peppers in the rice aisle (the aisle has Mexican and Oriental foods and dried beans), but if you don't want dried peppers or canned peppers, Walmart won't carry anything fresh outside of Jalapeños, Anaheims, Poblanos, and Serranos, and Mini Sweet Peppers.

**For those of you that don't know, I work part-time at Walmart in the Produce section.**

The canned Chipotle's in adobo are usually found in the mexican aisle with other canned peppers, refried beans, etc.

If you want the dry chipotles they are sometimes found in the produce section in a plastic bag. Most stores are pretty hit or miss on whether or not they'll have these at any given time.

You should also be able to find chipotle powder in the spice section of most stores...it is essentially the dried pepper ground up into a powder.

Actually now that I think about it, I believe I've seen chipotle's in jars at Kroger stores here in Findlay.