Just received a batch of Country Chef’s Hickory Smoke, Mustard, and Sweet and Spicy.   I really enjoyed the philosophy of these sauces, the jars themselves, and the flavors.   The Hickory Smoke flavor must have been the original flavor.  It all started here and then branched out towards a spicier variant and a mustard based sauce.  […]

Needless to say, I really liked this stuff. The flavor was complex and sophisticated and not sweet to my tastebuds. Some of the sauces I get are more like candy, while this is a sauce that took a spice rub concept as the incumbent; surrounded by a solid set of staffers from worlds of ketchup, worcestershire, chile paste, and liquid smoke. So that gives it a salty, savory flavor with a bit of smoke and seasonings. It’s a bin on the thin side, but not so thin as to distract from the great flavor that the sauce offers.

I like the secret ingredient in this one is the mix of a darkly sweet, molasses-based BBQ sauce flavor mixed with mustard and mustard bran. The mustard bran adds a little texture and almost a crunch to the sauce, much like adding little tiny bits of graham crackers to your yogurt. In a BBQ sauce, this is good or bad depending on your preference. Some questionable ingredients: Artificial color, modified corn starch, hydrolyzed soy proteins.

One of the original 2 sauces produced by Grumpy’s , the Not So Bold sauce is described as a Sweet BBQ Sauce.  And usually that’s not enough to describe most sauces with their nuances and different choice of sweeteners and whether they have smoke or spice and so on…  but for this sauce, it’s almost […]