Sunday, July 25, 2010

Chipotle-Cherry Barbecue Sauce


No SMS this week. I made this week's recipe for Toasted Almond Lemon Bars before joining SMS and it was not successful. I blame a lot of my failure with this particular recipe to switching to extra-large eggs after hearing my beloved Ina Garten say that doing so improved her baking for the 100th time. Extra-large eggs may be a better value, but they completely jacked up every recipe I tried to use them in. My failure aside, the flavor profile of the bars is fantastic! You can visit Rebecca at Indecisive Baker to get the recipe.

One of my New Year's resolutions a couple of years back was to make a least one recipe out of each issue of Bon Appetit. Most months I was able to find something that I wanted to make that didn't intimidate me in terms of ingredients and technique. Some months it was a challenge to find a recipe but that was not the case with the July 2010 issue. I quickly bookmarked several recipes to try including this one for Chipotle-Cherry Barbeque Sauce. While still not a fan, cherries are growing on me as an ingredient and I liked the idea of using cherry jam in this recipe.

I like making homemade barbeque sauce and once you get past the mile long list of ingredients most recipes call for, it is very easy to make. This recipe was no exception and I was drawn to not only the cherries and chipotles in the recipe, but the use of soy sauce and cocoa. This recipe is a simple study in the cooking principle of balancing flavors (sweet, salty and sour). The final result is a thick sauce that is sweet yet spicy. I only added one chipotle and told my husband it was a cherry BBQ sauce because he doesn't like anything spicy. He enjoyed the light coating of sauce I added to some grilled ribs the first night and didn't detect any heat. The smugness I felt at having tricked him was short lived and I was busted a couple of nights later when I slathered pork chops with the sauce and the heat of the chipotle intensified while sitting in the fridge. I found the sauce to be a tad too spicy this time and that the other flavors were lost. If you like heat, I would prepare the recipe as written, but in the future I would only use a half of a chipotle or use all of the sauce immediately.

Chipotle-Cherry Barbeque Sauce
Bon Appetit, July 2010

1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup cherry preserves
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons mild-flavored (light) molasses
2 tablespoons golden brown sugar
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel
1 to 2 canned chipotle chiles in adobo, minced, plus 1 tablespoon adobo sauce from can
1 teaspoon liquid smoke
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder

Preparation
Bring ketchup, cherry preserves, lemon juice, molasses, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, lemon peel, chiles, adobo sauce, liquid smoke, onion powder, and cocoa powder to simmer in medium saucepan, stirring often. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 10 minutes, stirring often. Season sauce to taste with salt and pepper.

DO AHEAD Sauce can be made up to 1 week ahead. Cover tightly and refrigerate.
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3 comments:

  1. This looks deicious, the flavors sound great.

    We loved the lemon bars!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The cherry preserves are an interesting choice. The ingredients sound like they make a great mix. I just printed it up for the future barbecues.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This sounds so good! I love the combination of ingredients and flavors.

    I had some issues with the lemon bars too (mainly with the crust) but I still thought they were delicious. I use extra large eggs (sometimes even bigger, they're fresh eggs from my step father's chickens) and I'm always careful to weigh them so I can be sure I'm not using way too much egg. When it's a recipe that calls for only one egg I don't worry about it too much, but for recipes that call for lots of eggs, I find I can sometimes use 3 instead of 4 or 2 instead of 3, etc. It generally works well, so maybe give that a shot?

    ReplyDelete

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