This is one "perfect" barbecue sauce … so much so that I simply deleted my other recipes for barbecue sauce. It is not cloyingly sweet. It has a great taste. If you are hooked on very sweet barbecue sauces you will have to look elsewhere for a recommendation.

The way to use this sauce best is not at the table, though it tastes mighty good at the table too. Baste it on baby back ribs that have already been wrapped tightly in aluminum foil and baked at 230ºF for 4 to 5 hours, then drained of water and rendered fat. Cut the baked ribs, baste them in sauce, and bake the basted ribs on a baking sheet an additional 30 minutes without the aluminum foil.

Now let's digress a bit and look at the world of commercial sauces that claim to be Kansas City Classic barbecue sauce. I found only one, KC Masterpiece® Kansas City Classic, and you can no longer buy that product, for someone acquired the rights and took if off the market ... no doubt to promote their own brand! I truly despise that practice as it denies us the best for the least cost. So, what can you do if you don't have time to make the barbecue sauce? I found that Cattlemen's® Kansas City Classic was deficient but correctable with the addition of tamarind paste and chili powder ... one tablespoon each per quart of sauce. Enough said ... I hope you take the time to make the sauce in this recipe as it is a real winner.

Yield: 5 cups

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons of chili powder

1 teaspoon of ground black pepper

1 teaspoon of table salt

2 cups of ketchup

1/2 cup of Yellow mustard

1/2 cup of cider or white vinegar

1/3 cup of Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup of lemon juice

1/4 cup of steak sauce

1/4 cup of dark molasses

1/4 cup of honey

1 teaspoon of Texas Pete’s® Hot Sauce

1 cup of dark brown sugar (you can use light brown sugar)

3 tablespoons of vegetable oil or butter

1 medium onion, finely chopped

4 medium cloves of garlic, minced

1 or 2 teaspoons of Wright’s® liquid smoke hickory flavoring

1 tsp. of Koldkiss® concentrated sodium benzoate solution (optional)

Secret Ingredient: Add 2 tablespoons of Tamarind paste. This exotic ingredient isn't really all that exotic. It shows up on the ingredient lists of great BBQ sauces. It has a sweet citrus flavor and really amps up a sauce. If you can't find it in an Asian grocery it is available through the Internet.

I found tamarind paste in block form at an Asian market for $3.99 for a 16 oz. package. That was much cheaper than the tamarind advertised on the Internet (at the time) but the processing was a pain in the butt. Then I came across the Tamicon® brand of tamarind paste via Amazon.com and it was inexpensive and easy to use and excellent. I recommend buying the prepared paste instead of processing a block of tamarind that has fiber and seeds included.

The tamarind does make a fabulous difference. Friends and relatives are going nuts over how great this sauce is with baby back ribs. Yeah … that’s what good cooking is all about!

Directions:

Mix the chili powder, black pepper, and salt in a small bowl. Mix the ketchup, mustard, vinegar, Worcestershire, lemon juice, steak sauce, molasses, honey, hot sauce, brown sugar, the sodium benzoate solution (optional) and finally the tamarind paste in a large bowl.

Warm the butter in a large 1 gallon pot Over medium heat. Add the onions and sauté them until they are limp and translucent, about 5 minutes.

Add the garlic, stir it into the onions and cook for another minute or two.

Add the dry spices and stir well for about 2 minutes to extract their oil-soluble flavors.

Add the wet ingredients from the large bowl. Mix well, heat to a simmering temperature of about 180 degrees F and simmer over medium heat for 15 minutes with the lid off to thicken the sauce, stirring a few times.

Taste and adjust the sauce. Add more of anything that you want a little bit at a time. It may taste a bit vinegary at first, but that will be less obvious when you use it.

Process the sauce through a conical colander with a conical wooden roller if you want the chunks of onion and garlic to be completely crushed/integrated into the sauce (That is what I do). You can use the barbecue sauce immediately, but I think it is better when stored overnight. You can store it in clean bottles in the refrigerator for a month or two. I like to use canning jars for that purpose.

I have also vacuum sealed the sauce in small canning jars and I keep them stored in the refrigerator. That makes the shelf life even longer. I also added sodium benzoate to my last batch and now the shelf life will easily be a year or more. One point regarding food preservation should be added ... many of the ingredients used already have a food preservative included, like the ketchup, the mustard, the Worcestershire sauce and the steak sauce, and of the other ingredients, some do not require a preservative, like the vinegar, the honey and the spices.