Rum Based BBQ Sauce

If you ever have looked, almost everything these days has corn syrup in it.  I don't eat corn because of food allergies. So onto the internet I went, looking at various recipes.  I found one by Steven Raichlen on his Barbeque! Bible website titled RumBullion BBQ Sauce. This was last Tuesday. I bookmarked the page so I could return to it closer to the weekend and make the sauce.  I knew I was going to have to tweak it because he uses soy sauce and I would have to either use corn syrup free ketchup or make my own.  No biggie.

So when I went back to his page on Friday, he had redesigned his website and the link took me to his home page. I used his search feature. No Luck.  Went through page after page of recipes on his site. No Luck.

This wasn't working out as planned.

So back to Google I went.  I typed "RumBullion" in the search box and got several results. None on the first page had the recipe.  But on the second page I found a Boston Globe article with an adaptation of the recipe.  It looked close enough to what I remembered of the original that I went with it.

Here is what I came up with:

1/4/cup Dark Rum
1/4 cup Honey
1/4 cup Granulated Sugar
2 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
1 Tablespoon Molasses
3 Tablespoons Worcester Sauce (Lea & Perrin's is gluten free)
Juice of 1 Small Lemon
Juice of 1/2 Small Orange
1 Tablespoon Distilled Vinegar
1/4 Teaspoon Hickory Liquid Smoke
1 Teaspoon Garlic Powder
1 Teaspoon Onion Powder
1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon Nutmeg
1/2 Teaspoon Sea Salt

1 Cup Tomato Sauce

This allowed me to avoid anything with corn syrup in it and avoid the soy sauce in the original recipe.

Directions:

Place everything except the ketchup in a medium saucepan and stir well.  Bring it to a boil and reduce heat to allow it to simmer for about 5 minutes.  Add tomato sauce, stir well and return to a boil.  Reduce heat again and allow it to simmer until desired consistency.

Taste it.  To be honest, I thought it was a bit too sweet but decided to allow it to set overnight to allow the flavors to continue to mingle before changing anything.  So I let it cool down and poured it into a jar to refrigerate overnight. I'm not sure refrigeration is needed as everything that goes in it is stored at room temp, but better safe than sorry.

I was making this as the BBQ sauce to add to my BBQ Beans (recipe upcoming) and to use on the burgers we were going to grill.

The next morning I removed the sauce from the fridge and tasted it.  The flavors had mixed together some and it didn't seem as sweet.  So I decided to use it "as-is".

The beans were very good, as was the sauce added on the burgers after cooking. While I don't know if I would use this recipe on beef again, I think it would be great with pulled pork or shredded chicken.

I may have to go get a pork shoulder and whip up another batch of this to test my theory!