St. Louis barbecue sauce
Thinner, sharper and less sweet than the Kansas City sauce it is constantly mistaken for. It is built for grilled pork steaks rather than smoked ribs, and being thin is the entire point, because it has to soak in during grilling instead of glazing at the end.
St. Louis style, thin and vinegar-forward, written for pork steaks
Ingredients
Written for a 2 L pot
Sauce
- 400 g ketchup rounded
- 200 ml cider vinegar, nearly twice what the Kansas City version takes, and that is the difference rounded
- 100 ml water rounded
- 40 g dark brown sugar rounded
- 30 g yellow mustard, more than most tomato sauces take; it is part of the sharpness rounded
- 20 ml Worcestershire sauce rounded
- 5 g celery salt, the quiet marker of the style, and worth buying for this alone rounded
- 5 g coarse black pepper rounded
- 5 g garlic granules rounded
- 5 g onion granules rounded
- 5 g fine salt rounded
- 2 g cayenne rounded
Dietary labels are a guide, not a guarantee. If you have an allergy, read the ingredients yourself.
Method
- Whisk it all together cold, then bring it to a bare simmer.
- Fifteen minutes, uncovered, low. Stir often. It is thinner than the Kansas City sauce so it catches less readily, but it still catches.
- Use it hot and thin. This sauce is meant to go onto meat that is still cooking, not onto meat that is finished.
The pork steak, which is the whole reason this sauce exists
St. Louis barbecue is not really about ribs. It is about pork steaks, cut from the shoulder, which are cheap, fatty, tough and completely unsuited to fast grilling. The local method is to grill them hard on both sides, then braise them in a pan of this sauce, covered, on the cooler side of the grill for an hour.
That is why it is thin. A thick sauce cannot braise anything. The vinegar and the water are there to break down a cut that would otherwise be inedible off a grill, and the result is somewhere between barbecue and a pot roast.
Notes
- Celery salt is the tell. It appears in almost every St. Louis recipe and almost no Kansas City one. It reads as savoury rather than as celery, and it is the reason the sauce tastes older than it is.
- Do not reduce it to fix it. If it tastes thin, it is correct. If it tastes harsh, it needs five more minutes or a little more sugar, not evaporation.
- It keeps a month in the fridge and separates slightly. Shake it.
- Maull’s is the local bottle, and has been since 1926. It is worth tasting alongside a Kansas City bottle to understand how different two red sauces can be.
Ingredient substitutions
- Worcestershire sauce contains anchovy and usually malt vinegar. For vegetarian or gluten-free, use a tablespoon of tamari with a teaspoon of white miso.
- Celery salt is easy to make if you cannot find it: grind celery seed with an equal weight of fine salt. Celery seed on its own is harsher and you need about half as much.
Sources consulted
Good with
From Christoph Mayer