If you're used to Texas, Memphis or Kansas City barbecue cusine, you're probably familiar with tomato-based sauce, which is prevalent in those genres of barbecue.  But did you know that Carolina-style barbecue is based on pork, and that most sauces are vinegar based?  On the Eastern Seaboard, the sauce is pure vinegar, and ketchup only starts to appear as you move west, into the Piedmont Region.  Here's my recipe for authentic Western Carolina-style barbecue sauce.

---

Special tools:  Quart mixing bowl
Preparation time:  About 5 minutes
Cooking time:  None, let mixture "rest" an hour before serving
Yield:  2 cups

---

2 cups apple cider vinegar; do not substitute
2 tablespoons tightly packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt; I prefer kosher
1 teaspoon black pepper; I prefer to grind my own using a peppermill
1 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes

---

Combine ingredients in ceramic or plastic mixing bowl.  You can serve immediately, but it would be best to let flavors combine together for an hour or so, or better yet, overnight.  

Serve chilled or at room temperature.  This sauce will keep for several weeks in your refrigerator if you store it in a covered container.

---

This barbecue sauce is delicious with smoked pork, and pork is meansCarolina-style barbecue.  This sauce will compliment any barbecued pork cut of meat, including shoulder, butt and ribs.  It's especially good with Carolina-style pulled pork sandwiches.  If you've never tasted this spicy, vinegar-based sauce from the Eastern Seaboard, you owe it to yourself to serve it at your next pork barbecue.

If you're in the mood for a bit of trivia, the reason no tomato sauce appears in Eastern North Carolina sauce is that when the area was first settled, in the early 1600's, the colonial settlers though tomatoes were poison, so they were shunned.  A hundred years or so later, as settlers moved inland, they saw the light and realized all the great barbecue sauce their fathers and grandfathers had missed out on, due to their foolish beliefs that tomatoes were poisonous.
 

---

Copyright(c) 2007 Eric's eRench Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. This site has been on the web since December 22, 2002.

Web page design has been created by eRench Productions, Inc., custom photography for any occasion...