This Is The Worst BBQ Sauce According To 45% Of People
The practice of grilling our meat has been around for a while — for about 1.8 million years, in fact, when the first Homo erectus discovered what fire could do to raw ingredients (via LiveScience). And while bastes and barbecue sauces haven't been around for as long, we know that cooks began to use ingredients like fat (butter), spices (salt and pepper), and vinegar to improve the flavors of their meats since the 19th century. We've come a long way since then, and today our meats are prepared on sophisticated grills, and basted with sauces that range from drippings to Worcestershire sauce.
What you like to dress your grilled meats with depends very much on what part of the country you happen to be. Many barbecue sauces in parts of the Carolinas start with a tomato and vinegar base to which seasoning like black pepper, red pepper, and sugar might be added. In other parts of the Carolinas, some folks add white barbecue sauce with a mayo base, and still others reach for a mustard blend that turns their sauces yellow (via Serious Eats).
Mashed readers ranked the BBQ brand they're most likely to pass up on
So, what inspired the typical American barbecue sauce out of a bottle then? Serious Eats writer Robert Moss points to Kansas City, Missouri, where barbecue sauce is a mixture we would recognize — dark brown, rich in color, heavy and sweet, and this is where Mashed's survey of America's least favorite barbecue sauces begins.
Those of use who might use barbecue sauce as a condiment for everything will probably have their least favorite sauces, but 45.02% of the 642 people who responded to Mashed's survey say the brand they're most likely to take a hard pass on at the grocery store has Kraft's label on it. Trailing a distant second on the list of least-favorite barbecue sauces is Stubb's at 14.49%. King's Hawaiian and Sweet Baby Ray's come in at third and fourth with 11.21% and 11.06%, respectively, while Jack Daniel's comes in at fifth least-favorite at 10.28%.
As far as bottled sauces go, KC Masterpiece was the most liked with 7.94% of you telling Mashed that this is the brand you disliked the least.