Homemade Barbecue Sauce Recipe

Let's start with the obvious things first. If you buy a bottle of barbecue sauce it will have to have some sort of artificial additive as a preservative should you not finish the bottle all in one go. Is that a health risk? Well probably not but it is still something added to a sauce that doesn't have to be there other than to fulfil the practicalities of mass production and consumerism. Having said this, one of the most common preservatives used in foodstuffs is phenylalanine, something that occurs naturally in many homemade barbecue sauce recipes. Read on and I'll explain this point more.

If you can make a barbecue sauce at home then it's got to be all for the better not just because of the negative connotations around the addition of additives but also because of the positives around fresh ingredients, especially tomatoes.

There's a lot said and written about the Mediterranean lifestyle and how the abundance of unsaturated oils in the diet lead to a long and healthy life (and I'm not disputing this at all) but I think that tomatoes are also a contributory factor to a healthy life. Just to complete where this is going - tomatoes are a staple ingredient in any good homemade barbecue sauce recipe.

Tomatoes are rich in a substance called lycopene which helps to stimulate the immune system. It's the lycopene that gives tomatoes their red color and if tomatoes help keep us immune from disease than that's got to be a good thing hasn't it?

It's also interesting to note that tinned tomatoes are more rich in lycopene that fresh so this is why I like to make a barbecue sauce using the canned variety. If you talk to any Italian chef, they'll always tell you that if there's one ingredient in the larder that always keep stocked up, it's canned tomatoes.

Ironically it's also the tomato that acts as a natural source of phenylalanine! Not to the point that it can act as a preservative in it's own right but there are benefits to having a natural source of phenylalanine in the diet - it is actually an anti-depressant.

So here we go, my favorite homemade barbecue sauce recipe is made using canned tomatoes and here are the ingredients:

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 onion, coarsely chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 inch cube fresh ginger crushed

1 red chilli finely chopped and de-seeded

1 440ml can of chopped tomatoes

1 tablespoons cider vinegar

Juice of half a lemon

2 tablespoons of brown Muscovado sugar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon salt

Method

Heat the oil in a pan and throw in the chopped onion and garlic. Fry for about 5 minutes until the onion starts to turn translucent and then add the chilli and the ginger. After about a further minute of stirring you'll detect the fragrance of the garlic and the ginger and it is a this point that you need to add the remainder of the ingredients.

Stir everything together and bring the sauce to a simmer. Allow it to simmer and reduce for about 45 minutes or until the BBQ sauce reaches the consistency that you are looking for and then serve.