Southern Vinegar Barbecue Sauce Recipe

This is a traditional vinegar-based carolina-style barbecue sauce. Notice that there is no tomato base in this recipe, just lots of flavor. As with any traditional vinegar sauce, this is thin, with a watery consistency. While this sauce is intended for pork, you can use it on beef, chicken, and even lamb. It's entirely up to you. If you grew up using bottled tomato-based barbecue sauce, you may not realize that the original barbecue sauce is more like that produced by this recipe. The bottled stuff follows the kansas city tradition and is thick, sweet, and often smoky. But barbecue sauce started out as a lemon, salt, and pepper baste for smoked meat, especially pork. Along the eastern coastline, whole hogs were often smoked in open pits (as they still are today) and this sauce helped maintain moisture during the long cooking hours. Vinegar was substituted for lemons in areas where they weren't commonly grown. You will find this type of vinegar sauce served with barbecue in the eastern carolinas. Once you head west, tomato again makes its appearance in the sauces served, although they are still far thinner and less sweet than in a typical bottled sauce.