Lip Lickin’ Sauce – Bold & Spicy BBQ (3/5)

Plus side: Great cooked flavor, use of simple healthy ingredients, and no weird preservatives and thickening agents. Anchovies.

Downside: Thin, no heat when expected, a little boring. Anchovies.

Western North Carolina style BBQ sauce is thin by design, but sometimes a little too thin for my tastes. Lip Lickin’ Sauces market Western North Carolina style sauce (thin) available in two flavors. Smoky and Sweet, and Bold and Spicy. I tried the Bold and Spicy and was pleased with my dinner, however a little thrown off guard by a product I was expecting to have some ZING.

On to the tasting.

I sampled the flavor before cooking it up. Straight outta the bottle, when it got home from the grocery store, it was room temperature, and almost covered my entire countertop as I tried to land a drop of the sauce onto an innocent unsalted saltine (oxymoron?). Did I mention this stuff is thin? Eventually I tasted it. There’s not a lot of complexity, but for first time tasters and newbies, this could make is a much preferred alternative to the mass market stuff. The first few ingredients of the bottle usually give away an idea of the expected flavor, and in this case it’s tomato sauce, vinegar, sugar, and water… They keep it simple, so you can actually taste most of what’s in there if you have for tastebuds for it. Sniffing it reveals a strong vinegar / tomato / black pepper / anchovies aroma – which is different and nice.

Consistency

Well, yeah, it was thin. Things tend to thicken a bit when they are cold, so I waited a fortnight before firing up the grill to sample this BBQ sauce. And behold – after time in the fridge, the sauce was a new man! Thickened up enough just enough to be applied easily to the chicken at about the 3/4 mark in grill cooking doneness. Beginners note – always apply BBQ sauce late in the cooking process, otherwise the sugars burn up and thus their flavors burns away into a dark black soot skin – which isn’t tasty for most humans except my dad.

Cooking

On to the cooking. I applied liberal amounts of Lip Lickin’ Sauce – Bold & Spicy BBQ – to 6 drumsticks. The drumsticks had already been cooking for awhile (I tend to cook thicker chicken parts using indirect heat to make sure they cook all the way through). I used a baster to scoop/brush on the sauce and well, because this style just isn’t that thick, it takes a little more sauce to ensure coverage. A little while later after three rounds of flipping and applying, they were done.

Taste

Nothing really special, nothing new, nothing that makes me think “this is going to be my house sauce from now on”, but all in all, I’d say this is worth a try. Again, the carefully selected ingredients (only ten) are a great testament to this small, authentic BBQ sauce maker. The sauce becomes nice and sticky, and you can taste less flavors than when it’s uncooked, but I think the “highlighted” flavors left over are just great. The edge of the vinegar burns off, and the sweetness drops down a notch to make quite a bold flavor indeed.

What’s missing was the Spicy. I guess the word “spicy” has several different meanings and if you wanted to get literally it must be something close to “has a lot of different spices” when used in a food sense. But, most people I know, including myself, use spicy to describe things that are hot. The only peppers they use in this sauce are the household staple black and the colorful red – and these combined have about … zero heat.

Good value – $3.69 for 19 ounces.

Ingredients: Tomato sauce, vinegar, sugar, water, black and red peppers, salt, corn syrup, garlic spices, anchovies & tamarinds.

Nutrition Info: 50 calories per 34g serving, no fat, 12g carbs, 310mg sodium