Thought I would give a book review for the heck of it. Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades is one of the first BBQ books I bought when I started to get real serious into BBQ. I had wanted to make my own BBQ sauce and this looked like a step in the right direction. It has been some time since I first bought it, but I can remember clearly sitting down to look at it and ended up reading the thing from cover to cover. I'll tell you one thing, there aren't too many cookbooks that you can say that about. You can do that with Steve's books as well as Ray's (Dr. BBQ) books as well. I think that any good cookbook worth it's salt (pun intended) should be similar in nature. I finally came across a basic bbq sauce that sounded like your traditional BBQ sauce. I checked over the list, and ended up going to the grocery store the next morning to get what I was lacking. These days that would rarely happen, but at the time I didn't have as full a stocked pantry as I do now.
OK, I'm back home with everything and make the small batch size that the recipe was for. Fantastic! This is what I have been looking for! It was excellent! I immediately multiplied the batch size by 10 and went back to the store for more ingredients. This was around the end of November I believe as I was also trying my hand at smoking cheese as well (something that could only be done on my cooking equipment when it was cold). I made a couple of large batches and canned the whole mess. Everyone in the neighborhood got BBQ sauce and smoked cheese that year for Christmas.
The recipe was called sweet and smokey BBQ sauce. I have since changed it up quite a bit and the version I now make is something pretty much my own, but would not have known where to start without this book and the vast amount of information in it. There are lots of other good starters as well. Flipping through it just now I see some things that I bookmarked and never got around to trying, but will probably do so shortly. I have my eye on the pineapple garlic glaze.
Pick it up if you get a chance. You'll be glad you did. http://www.barbecuebible.com/
