Whether you’re using it as a dip or as part of a marinade, a sauce can add lots of depth to your meal. With summer well underway and weekend barbecues a norm in most places, finding an excellent barbecue sauce will be important.
We believe the best barbecue sauce will give your prime cuts acidity along with smoke — and other flavors to perfect your meal. But in searching for that perfect sauce, you’ll find dozens of tangy ones and sweet ones, many of which are available from smaller producers online.
To make it easier for you to find the best barbecue sauce of 2024, I gathered 15 bottles of spicy, smoky, vinegary, sweet and tangy sauces, along with several enthusiastic barbecue-loving friends, for an ultimate sauced-up showdown to find the best barbecue sauce on the market.
What makes a good barbecue sauce?
It’s all relative, but most pitmasters agree that balance is key to a great barbecue sauce. Most sauces are made with a tomato base, vinegar, some sweetener like honey or molasses and an element of heat. From there, sauces are fine-tuned with spices and flavors, such as mustard, garlic, fruit and smoke. Any sauce that’s too overwhelming in any one direction usually doesn’t work well. Super simple sauces without much spice or complexity often fall flat.Â
We tasted many traditional Kansas City-style sauces for this list, a host of vinegar-heavy Carolina-style sauces, some keto-friendly sauces, Bachan’s cult-favorite Japanese-style sauce and a few Alabama white sauces to see which ones really tickled our taste buds. We tried each one with plain unseasoned chicken breast since it’s a rather blank slate as far as classic grilled foods go. When tasting, we noted things like overall balance, heat, sweetness, overwhelming flavors or anything else that jumped out, both bad and good.
Read more:Â Best Meal Kits of 2023
A quick note: Up north, sweeter varieties dominate the sauce market, but my taste testers and I all enjoy vinegar-based sauces too, so we included several Carolina barbecue sauces (among other styles, like a Japanese barbecue sauce for umami, or brown-sugar-based recipes for that iconic sweet flavor) to make this list as inclusive and unbiased as possible.
It took a lot of napkins to find the best barbecue sauce in 2024. Here they are.
Full Moon is a regional chain of barbecue restaurants in Alabama and Mississippi that’s been in operation since 1986. You won’t likely find Full Moon’s incredible sauce on store shelves, but it can be purchased online for $7.49 a bottle. Thank goodness for that, because this classic-style sauce has a near-perfect balance of sweetness, smokiness, tang and spice.
If you prefer to scoop your barbecue sauce up from the store, Stubb’s stuff can be found in most supermarkets and it’s an excellent alternative to Full Moon. Like the winner above, Stubb’s has a good balance with no single flavor taking over. This one is thick but not gloppy and gets its sweetness from brown sugar (no corn syrup) with a good kick from lots of black pepper.
I’ve been on the Bachan’s bandwagon for some time now and I don’t plan on hopping off. Bachan’s is atypical compared with classic barbecue sauces in that it’s laced with Japanese flavors, giving it a huge umami punch. You’ll notice soy sauce immediately, along with sesame, ginger and a delicate sweetness. This is one of the thinner sauces so it might not adhere as well to ribs and chicken or caramelize as others do, so it’s probably best used as a finishing sauce.Â
Bachan’s is also pricey at $13 for one bottle, but you can save a few bucks when you order multiple at a time. (Trust me, you’ll want more than one bottle.)
