Christoph and Steffi's Food and Travel & Christoph and Steffi's Food and Travel
A jar and bowl of thin dark red vinegar barbecue sauce with chilli flakes and coarse pepper suspended in it, clearly watery rather than thick
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Carolina vinegar sauce

The thin, sharp, peppery sauce that eastern North Carolina puts on pulled pork. It looks like nothing in the jar and it is the reason the meat tastes of anything, because its whole job is cutting through fat.

Prep10 min
0
Rest720 min
Servings16
Cook mode

Eastern North Carolina style, thin and unthickened

Ingredients

Units
Temperature
Servings
16

Sauce

  • 600 ml cider vinegar
  • 120 ml water
  • 30 g dark brown sugar, enough to take the edge off, not enough to taste sweet
  • 12 g dried chilli flakes, the coarse red kind, and be generous
  • 8 g coarse black pepper
  • 12 g fine salt
  • 30 ml hot sauce, a plain cayenne one such as Texas Pete or Frank's

Dietary labels are a guide, not a guarantee. If you have an allergy, read the ingredients yourself.

Method

  1. Put everything in a jar and shake it. That is the recipe. No heat, no reduction, no blending.
  2. Leave it overnight at room temperature, and up to three days. The chilli needs time to bleed its colour and heat into the vinegar, and the raw sharpness rounds off. Tasting it in the first hour will make you think you have made a mistake.
  3. Shake before every use, because it separates and the good part settles.

Notes

  • It is supposed to be thin. People used to bottled sauce see water and assume something has gone wrong. This is not a glaze and it will not cling. It soaks in, which is the point.
  • Sugar is a corrective, not a flavour. Thirty grams in three quarters of a litre takes the raw edge off the vinegar. If you can taste sweetness, there is too much.
  • Use it three ways. A third tossed through pulled pork as you pull it, more at the table, and the rest as a mop during the last hours of a cook.
  • It keeps for months in the fridge, and arguably improves. There is nothing in it that spoils.
  • Western North Carolina adds tomato and is a different sauce with the same ancestry. Adding a couple of spoons of ketchup takes you there.

Ingredient substitutions

  • Cider vinegar is traditional. White vinegar is sharper and more austere and is also authentic to parts of the state. Wine vinegar tastes wrong here.
  • Texas Pete is the North Carolina bottle. Any thin cayenne-and-vinegar hot sauce does the same job. Do not use a thick chipotle or sriracha-style sauce, which will cloud it and sweeten it.

Sources consulted

Good with

Sources consulted

From Christoph Mayer

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