Part of our process of cooking things from scratch involves growing vegetables in the garden. Last summer we had an excellent tomato harvest. We canned a lot of the tomatoes (not enough as we used up the last jar a couple weeks ago) and had some left that we wanted to do something with. Kelly doesn’t exactly like ketchup, but she found a recipe online made up a batch to can. It was quite a bit different than the plastic squeeze bottle from the supermarket. It wasn’t as thick and was a bit chunky, but it was sweet and zesty and had a nice spicy profile to it. It hasn’t replaced our plastic squeeze bottle for hamburgers and hot dogs, but we thought it would make a great base for a barbecue sauce. That is how we arrived at this homemade maple chipotle bbq sauce recipe. We used to buy one that was we really liked, but it came from a specialty food store and was quite a bit more that your run of the mill bbq sauce.
I looked at a number of regular barbecue sauce recipes online picked out the common elements, ketchup, vinegar, sugar, pepper and onion powder, and added those to a jar of our homemade ketchup. After cooking it for a few minutes the flavor was missing something. We like a little kick to our sauce so I added some cayenne pepper and chipotle chili powder. Now we had the spice, but probably a little too much. It was at that point that I realized that I needed to add some more sweet to it to tone down the spice. I had a moment of clarity and remembered that great maple chipotle barbecue sauce that we used to buy. I started putting a tablespoon or two at a time into the sauce until it tasted right. Oh boy, did it taste right. I think it was even better than the one we would buy. I made sure to take the time to notate the amounts of everything so that I could make it again.
I threw it together tonight after a soccer game. We had put a pork roast in the crockpot this afternoon and served the pulled pork with this sauce on some slider sized pretzel rolls. The combination was incredible.
I hope that you give this maple chipotle bbq sauce recipe a try. We never recorded the ketchup recipe, but I am pretty sure that it was the recipe from the ball jar blue book. If you are using bottled ketchup, I would put in a small dash or cinnamon, ground allspice and a tiny dash ground clove. That should cover the difference between the homemade and store bought ketchup.
Homemade maple chipotle bbq sauce recipe tips and tricks:
When simmering the ketchup, be sure not to get the temperature too high. Because of the amount of sugar in the recipe it can burn really easily.
- 2 cups ketchup
- ½ cup water
- ¼ cup apple cider vinegar
- 6 tbsp brown sugar
- 5 tbsp white sugar
- ¼ cup pure maple syrup
- 1-1/2 tsp onion powder
- 1 tsp ground mustard
- ⅛ tsp cayenne pepper
- ⅛ tsp chipotle chili powder
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- Add all ingredients and simmer for 30 minutes or until it reaches the desired thickness.
