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Homemade Sweet Barbecue Sauce Recipe

This Sweet Barbecue Sauce Recipe makes for a classic sweet-style sauce that’ll please nearly any palate. Take it as a good BBQ sauce base that can be tweaked to your own specifications and taste.
15 Mins Easy Makes a lot

Ingredients

  • 225g tomato paste or 200g double concentrate tomato puree
  • 1 cup water
  • 100g light brown sugar
  • 80ml apple cider vinegar
  • 1½ tbsp molasses
  • 1 tbsp onion powder
  • 1 tbsp chilli powder
  • 1 tbsp fresh cracked pepper
  • ½ tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 tsp kosher salt
  • 1 tsp celery salt

Method

  • Stir together all the ingredients in a medium saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
  • Reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer until slightly thickened, about 10 minutes.
  • Transfer the sauce to clean jars and store them in the refrigerator. The sauce will keep for a couple of months.
Sweet Barbecue Sauce Recipe

Recipe notes by our Food & Drink editor

One thing about making your own barbecue sauce is that there are as many recipes and opinions as there are grains of sand on the beach.

This Sweet Barbecue Sauce Recipe makes for a classic sweet-style sauce that will please nearly any palate. Take it as a good base that can be tweaked to your own specifications and taste.

If you don’t have tomato paste to hand, you can replace it with ketchup, but be sure to reduce the amount of brown sugar by half as the ketchup already comes with 22g of added sugar for every 100g.

Molasses or black treacle is a viscous substance resulting from refining sugarcane or sugar beets into sugar. The thick and dark syrup, with a sweet and mildly bitter taste, is a common ingredient in sweet recipes and baked goods.

Cracked pepper consists of large pieces of black pepper berries, which provide a burst of pepper flavour with each bite of food. This is especially good on salads and pasta, salsa and soup, or pressed into raw meat before cooking.

You can replace the fresh cracked pepper with ground black pepper for a smoother barbecue sauce.

To augment the recipe, you can add about 60g of Worcestershire sauce, 2 tbsp of mustard or 1 tbsp of Tabasco sauce (or your favourite hot sauce).

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