Captain Curt’s Famous Boss Sauce (4/5)

This tasty sauce has a really nice look, smell, and flavor, but had a few negatives that dropped it below a five star sauce. The downs were mainly with the ingredients selection and the label. These days, people are starting to get more conscious of what goes into their food, and barbecue sauce companies aren’t exactly leading the pack when it comes to ingredient naturalization (although BullsEye recently switched from HFCS to pure sugar in some products). This one puts in HFCS and MSG and has a very long list of ingredients.

The sauce tastes almost like Old Bay Seasoning (extremely popular in the Baltimore area for coating seafood - most often crab), but there is no indication on the label that people are going to leave with such a unique flavor on their lips. There’s a lot of complexity to the taste and the only flavor hint provided is the bold word “MILD” which isn’t necessarily enticing. A few mods, and it’s a five star sauce, Curt.

Smell

I think it smelled like a cross between Old Bay Seasoning, traditional tomato-based BBQ Sauce, and just a tiny hint of lemon. A unique flavor and a pleasing smell - not too vinegary like many sauces.

Consistency

Decent - but for some reason, this sauce poured on my steak and chicken acted a little bit like water repellent on a windbreaker. I had the grill going for awhile and this didn’t seem to caramelize like most sauces. Perhaps water being the first ingredient (not too common) is the culprit. Maybe it’s one of the other 50 ingredients in this compound blend.

Flavor

Before the grill and after the grill tastes were similar although the grill simply turned the flavor volume down a few degrees. When the first three ingredients are water, sweetener 1, sweetener 2 - that is likely to happen. Some other sauces get better with heat, I’d argue this sauce is better straight out of the bottle. This could make a nice BBQ bath for a slow-cooked Boston Butt - something that sits in the sauce for hours in a crockpot.

Ingredients

Water, HFCS, sugar, apple cider vinegar, tomato paste, white distilled vinegar, spice blend (dextrose, salt, cellulose gum, spices, onion powder, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, caramel color, garlic powder, lemon powder, spice extractives, red #4, no more than 2% silica gel as anti-caking agent), starch, soybean oil, Worcestershire sauce, pickling spice, MSG, liquid smoke, garlic powder, ground celery seed, onion powder, ground celery, chili powder, sodium benzoate (preservative), citric acid, paprika, ground bay leaves, red pepper, ground cumin, ground cloves. Contains: Fish and Soy

Marketing and Packaging

Presentation and concept of the bottle itself is simple and fun, but the photography on the label is of very low quality. Either the picture was taken with a very bad camera or in the process of creating the label some of the colors lost their saturation. The white plastic tops adds to this unprofessional look and to me, and makes it seem a little bit “cheap.”

Website

http://www.bbqchicago.com/pages/about_us.html

More about this vendor:

Curtis Briggs founded Curt’s Bar-B-Que Restaurants over 20 years ago in Chicago Illinois. After many years of satisfying the palates of people from all over the world, Captain Curt, as he is know today because of the overwhelming demand for his sauce, started packaging his famous Delectable Boss Sauce” over a decade ago from a family recipe developed by his grandfather, enhanced by his father, and handed down to Curt as a young man in his hometown of Pine Bluff Arkansas.

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