Start by deciding if you want a sweet tomato-based sauce, creamy white sauce or a tangier vinegar-based bottle to pour over your meat.
Most pitmasters agree that achieving balance is essential for a great barbecue sauce. Typically, these sauces are made with a tomato base, vinegar, and a sweetener like honey or molasses, along with a component for heat. From this foundation, sauces can be enhanced with a variety of spices and flavors, including mustard, garlic, fruit and smoke. If a sauce becomes too dominant in one flavor profile, it usually doesn’t work well. On the other hand, overly simple sauces lacking spice or complexity often fall flat.
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.