Just in time given CaJohn’s announcement of these products on his Flavor and Fire blog, we actually had a bottle of this BBQ sauce lurking on our “to-do” shelf where it’s been for about 6 weeks or so now. We had a chance to briefly taste this sauce awhile back as well, but nothing works quite as well as using at home in your own kitchen for a great BBQ dinner. (We actually had most of the other BBQ sauces as well, but have used them up before the big announcement.)

It’s a little cold to be standing outside at the grill, at least for us it is. These sauces simply beg to be used over an open flame, but we decided to make do with the heat of our oven for some BBQ pork loin. We picked up a couple of pounds of them at our local Sam’s Club just to have for simple barbeque feasts like this.

Ingredients: tomatoes, raspberries, brown sugar, sugar, corn syrup, soy sauce (water, wheat, soy beans, salt), vodka, Worcestershire sauce (distilled vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, water, salt, caramel color, garlic powder, sugar, spices, anchovies, tamarind, natural flavor), lime juice New-Mex chiles, garlic, onion, salt, spices, natural mesquite smoke flavor

First things first. We needed to add a little spice mix coating, just a little something to help bring out the flavor of the meat. We decided to stick with an all-CaJohns theme and use a light sprinkle of the Marguerita Pepper mix (not listed on the CaJohns website right now). It really is as simple as it looks. It’s not like doing a spice rub where you need to rub it into the meat…this is just a light coated sprinkle over both sides of the pork loins before they go in the oven.

Even though these were not originally frozen, we opted to cook these for about thirty minutes in the oven in a covered dish at 350 degrees before adding the BBQ sauce. It still elicited a fair amount of liquid from the meat, and we didn’t want to overly dilute the sauce so that it wouldn’t cling to the cooked meat. After these were about two-thirds cooked through, we added the sauce to the meat, coated it liberally, and put it back in the oven to bake for about another 15-20 minutes or so, checking the doneness of the meat every 5 minutes or so to keep them from being overcooked. At the end of the cooking time, the pork loins were thinly covered in BBQ sauce and smelled delightful. Out of the oven and onto our dinner plates they went.

The result: Like many BBQ sauces, the heat mellows the taste quite a bit. The straight taste is almost good enough to not require cooking at all. The raspberry is sweet, but not overly so, and the New-Mex chiles in the sauce give a low-medium heat level which seems to go well with this mix of ingredients. After cooking, the sweetness fades just enough and the mesquite smokiness comes out a little more…much like you’d expect from a good BBQ sauce.

I’m not sure pork was the best choice for this sauce. I think chicken might be better, or any sort of fowl for that matter. I’d also like to try this BBQ sauce over the open flame of the outside grill and I bet it would be an even better sorta taste. It was no slouch in this format, but play to your strengths when you can. A little sweet, a little spicy, and a lot smoky, there’s a lot to like in this BBQ sauce…and that’s without even mentioning the vodka! Get yourself a jar with the new label, and use it early and often. Enjoy!