The grand tradition of U.S. barbecue means something slightly different depending on the region that does the cooking. Cuts and selections, cooking methods, and serving styles all rise from the cultural roots that brought them to the table, creating a panoply of possibilities. But of all the indicators of an area’s culinary heritage, it’s the sauce that speaks loudest and most clearly about where your barbecue options originated — even if it shares a similar base with its Southern brethren, taken from core recipes handed down through French, English, and early American traditions. With four cardinal sauce formats to guide the palate — light tomato, heavy tomato, vinegar and pepper, and mustard — each sauce asserts its own personality, further improved by cooks who add their own twists until an exemplary sauce emerges to represent the region.
When you say you like “barbecue sauce,” do you know which regional sauce you’re referring to? Is it a Kansas City sauce with vinegar notes rising above the other ingredients, or is it an Oklahoma sauce where sweetness is overtaken by warm baking spices stirred into the mix? Before you hit the grill for your next big open-flame cooking occasion, it’s a good time to learn a little about what each region’s barbecue sauce brings to the collective table of American cookout culture. Take a look at the distinctions of these related yet individualized concoctions and discover what makes each one special in its own right.
Kansas City
The character of Kansas City barbecue depends on a rich reduction of tomatoes, molasses, onion, vinegar, mustard, and a variety of spices that becomes a sauce summoning tangy sweetness with a deep, full body. Informed by years of culinary evolution thanks to local cooks with a flair for creativity, the original tangy, vinegar-heavy sauce that made the city a barbecue innovator gradually shifted into the silky, rust-colored nectar it is today. This uniquely regional concoction can be credited to Henry Perry, an early-1900s Kansas City cook who began serving slabs of ribs for a quarter a pop, flavored with a rich sauce that would become indicative of a whole American culture. The basic idea for the sauce stemmed from Memphis, Perry’s hometown; his alterations helped create a foundational flavor that would give Kansas City world-renowned barbecue personality.
Taking the tradition even further, a child psychiatrist named Rich Davis tinkered with a molasses-forward iteration of Kansas City barbecue sauce in 1977. It sold like crazy and became KC Masterpiece, the popular bottled brand that helped spread the regional specialty from coast to coast and was once voted the best barbecue sauce in the world. Even if you’re into customizing your sauce for your specific needs, this pour-over gives you a perfect basting base to start from.
Memphis
You know you’ve captured the heart and soul of Memphis barbecue when the sauce is a blend of just about every bottle and jar in the spice rack and pantry, plus a few bottles from the fridge. But the traditions are part and parcel of the city’s history. Memphis’ status as a port town in the 1800s brought the fundamentals of early barbecue to the area, specifically molasses and hardwoods that would be used in open-fire cooking and transformed into an essential sauce. It led to the city becoming a destination for barbecue lovers, with a sauce that only Memphis could call its own…