There was a recipe in the Kraft Food & Family magazine for pulled pork sandwiches. That gave us the idea for making our own, except by doing it without going to the store at all.
Barbecue sauce was the first part of the equation, and it's so easy to make that I make it every other weekend or so. I do cheat a little by using ketchup, but only because the tomato paste and vinegar and seasonings I'd be using would essentially be making ketchup in the first place.
Steps to make barbecue sauce:
- Pour some ketchup into a saucepan. The ketchup will be about a third the mass of the entire finished result.
- Pour half that volume of brown sugar in.
- Add a few shots of worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and if you have it, liquid smoke.
- Pour in enough apple cider vinegar to make the whole thing liquid.
By cooking this over medium and tasting it frequently, you can adjust the taste with those ingredients until you get your base sauce at the perfect level between savory and acidic. (I usually do my red pepper at this point too, so I can also adjust for heat).
There are tons of things you can add to this to make your own special barbecue sauce. For our pulled pork, I used Newcastle Brown Ale, cayenne, and onion powder. Because that's how I roll.
The barbecue sauce in this instance went with some pork ribs into a slow cooker for 4 hours, got pulled, and got stirred back in. Tart-head made the hamburger buns, and excellent they were- but you'll have to wait for her update, because I have no idea how she made them.