The secret is in the sauce
For wow-factor gifts and next-level barbecue, home cooks are whipping up their own condiments
While there’s a huge range of prepared condiments available — and more hitting the market all the time — many home cooks are discovering how easy it is to whip up their own.
“People are paying close attention to where their ingredients are coming from,” said Toronto chef Corbin Tomaszeski. “They want to have the ability to say: ‘I made this from scratch.’
“I find that once people understand how simple it is to make them on your own they get more and more excited about doing it and then coming up with … personalized versions.”
From homemade sauces, rubs and marinades with international influences, to relish, mustard, ketchup and pickles, cooks are discovering ways to make their barbecues feel more artisanal.
They’re also prepping condiments for gifts, said grilling expert Steven Raichlen, who suggested possibilities including coffee rub, port mustard, ginger pear chutney, corn relish, mango mint ketchup or bacon bourbon barbecue sauce, which can all be packaged in an attractive jar with a hand-written label.
Novices can easily put together a delicious rub from ingredients they are likely have on hand. Raichlen’s basic rub — equal portions of salt, pepper, brown sugar and paprika — is a harmonious formula of sweet, salty, sour and hot, which offers a hit of flavour to pork, beef, chicken and robust fish such as salmon.
Tomaszeski likes to include cumin for its aromatic nuttiness and to add a Middle Eastern, South Asian or Mexican influence to his rubs.
“Cumin, oregano, brown sugar, onion, garlic, with a little bit of paprika is a winner every single time. Put in some cracked black pepper. If you want to add more heat, put in cayenne,” said Tomaszeski, whose latest venture is Savoury, a private dining room designed to mimic the feel of eating with the chef in his home, which is hidden in the back of the Westin Harbour Castle’s main kitchen.
“You can use it as a rub on your ribs. You can sprinkle it on chicken drumettes. You can sprinkle it on just vegetables on a skewer.
“It is a beautiful essence that you can add as a rub into the meat to get into the fibres or just as a quick sprinkle.”
Canada cuts the mustard as the second-largest producer in the world and exports more of this valuable crop than any other country. The beloved ballpark staple is made from finely ground yellow mustard seed and turmeric, which adds more depth of colour, along with vinegar and water. But it’s easy to make variations with brown or black seeds crushed or left whole, honey, different vinegars, beer, port, spirits, horseradish or herbs.
That other staple condiment — ketchup — originated in China, not North America, and was imported to the West three centuries ago, said Raichlen, author of the new book Barbecue Sauces, Rubs and Marinades — Bastes, Butters and Glazes, Too.
He’s always on the lookout for flavour inspiration when travelling.
A surprising discovery was the curiously named Monkey Gland Sauce, a sweet-spicy blend of chutney, wine and hot sauce from South Africa that actually doesn’t contain any primate parts.
Raichlen, who recently wrapped filming on the new TV show L’Atelier du Maitre du Grill for Zeste TV in Quebec, found another distinctive marrying of international flavours in a barbecue joint in Atlanta run by a husband from Texas and wife from Seoul, South Korea. They marinate pork shoulder in gochujang, a Korean fermented chili paste, and use the American soft drink Sprite in the sauce.
Raichlen said home grillers often err on when they add barbecue sauce to grilled foods.
“I use it as a lacquer right at the end. I cook ribs for two to three hours over an indirect or smoking process, pull them off, brush them with sauce and put them over the hot fire just for three minutes on the hot side of the grill just to sizzle or sear, char that sauce into the meat.
“The place for barbecue sauce is on the side, not on top. Taste the meat first and appreciate that quality of it, then add the barbecue sauce as a condiment.”
Many chefs and cookbook authors are also experimenting with homemade pickles to add crunch and piquancy to meals in as little as 20 minutes.
British celeb Nigella Lawson confessed to an obsession with “quick pickling” during a Toronto interview to promote her last cookbook, Simply Nigella.
She says her pickled favourites, which range from peppers and carrots to beets, ginger and eggs, require no special equipment or skills.
“I do think sometimes I want to have a sudden injection of something spiky and sprightly and sour in it and that’s where my pickles come in,” she says. “But I also do them quite small scale. I make enough for a jar.”