Your sauce or commercial sauce in competition?
 

Gents,

Just your pain in the ass polock looking for information about competition. Do you guys (and gals) use your own sauce or a commercial product to sauce during a competition? It would especially interesting to hear from guys who have won or placed highly but everyone is welcome to chime in.

Gent

Good luck getting the straight story on that one.......I've been asking that one for 2 years. I have never bought a sauce worse than the crap I have tried to make.
I use 3 different sauces for the 4 mains and Doctor them all with mixed results...

sawdustguy, IMHO tinkering with the rubs and sauces is 2/3 the fun of cooking q. now remember i have not competed yet, but when i do i intend to go all original. i do read every ingredient on every bottle of bbq sauce i can find though, and i juggle those ingredients into my own sauces.
phil

What do you use for the other spices ingredient......

what?!

Sawdust - As you accurately mentioned me and my brother in law are about where your team was about a yr ago, so I'm no expert.

Today, We discussed and tested BBQ sauces extensively. We used one homemade sauce , one gourmet sauce and five commercial sauces on a bunch of our chicken pcs. (The commerical sauces were KC Masterpiece, Sweet Baby Rays, Stubb's, Bullseye, Corky's (ordered online from the famous Memphis chain).

We decided for our first year of competiton to not use our own sauce as it was one extra step of preparation that may slow us down. We kept coming back to the point that while we can come up with a sauce we like on a personal level, our homemade sauce may not be what a lot of other people like. We chose to test some of the most famous commercial sauces figuring those are what most people know and like and that these companies in some cases may have done a lot of taste testing before going to market.

The commerical sauces ended up being to "commercial". Except for the Corky's product which was real nice, we were able to easily identify each sauce on the final product as the color and taste were very noticeable and seemed to overpower the chicken even with light glazing.

We agreed that our best bet for now was to go with a somewhat local gourmet BBQ sauce that met all the criteria we wanted. It's very smooth tasting and sweet, not too thick or thin, not too vinegary or spicy but seemed to be mild enough to not overpower the rub. It was the only one that we did not think about the sauce as we enjoyed the chicken. It complemented it the way we wanted.

As we progress, I'm sure we'll change things up, but I'm just glad we were able to reach an agreement on something that could be very sensitive between teammates just getting started on agreeing on things.

When the ingredient list says "other spices". I assume that means to put in some of all the other spices on your shelf that you have not already used.:grin:

Moderators - Didn't we already discuss this about 2 weeks ago? Maybe a thread merge is in order?

if you use homemade in competition, do you have to make it on the spot or can you bring it in?
phil

I've used both.Right now I'm using tweeked commercial.

Willy T.

you can bring it.....

As for me, I use a combination of 4 commerical sauces, a slight addition of my rub, and doctored up with some honey. But, I (we) don't use the same combination on all the meat entries

Yep!

I used to make my own, but switched quite a few years ago. I now have that same sauce bottled, but haven't gone back to it for competition. There are so many good sauces available now, that most of the cooks I know are using a bottled sauce, either straight or doctored.

Pretty much the same story with rub. I use the stuff I sell in 10lb boxes, not the pepper blend. I add turbinado sugar and red pepper. I could leave all the other spices at home.

Gents,

If I have duplicated a thread that was discussed in the recent past please forgive me. I was lazy and did not do a search.

Vinny, congrats on the new name. I agree, I think we will be more successful doctoring up a commercial sauce that is regionalized to an event location. I also don't feel comfortable using my own sauce at the level the team is at right now although we am doing some experimenting from time to time.

My Team uses my Commercial BBQ Sauce at competition. The first sauce took me 2 years to refine. The next 3 only took a few months. I develope my rubs and sauces to be used at contest. I don't scrimp on ingredience to lower the price. If you have the basics , you can develope a sauce that will suit your needs. Keep in mind, when you are making a sauce for competition that you are not trying to please your own tastes, but the majority of the judges tastes.

Good Luck!!

Spice