This is the first of many products we tried at the most recent Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire show, and one whose booth should have drawn more attention that it received. Kelly’s Classic Homestyle Hot and Spicy BBQ Sauce is in the classic mode of traditional red BBQ sauces, made with a tomato sauce base, along with other ingredients you see in a lot of mass-market BBQ sauces:

Ingredients: reconstituted tomato paste, sugar, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, water, salt, caramel color, sugar, spices, anchovies, and tamarind), mustard (water, ground mustard seed, vinegar, salt, and turmeric), molasses, natural hickory smoke flavor, modified corn starch, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, cayenne pepper, and other spices

First impression: Big eighteen-ounce bottle with a simply-stated label. Despite the words “hot & spicy” being emblazoned on the bottle, you’ll notice that cayenne pepper seems to be the only ingredient that fits the mold for that. Great smoky aroma and nearly perfect consistency for a BBQ sauce as it crawls from the bottle when poured. Going back to the ingredients, I take a great deal of pride in mentioning that this is one of the most wholesome set of ingredients for a BBQ sauce I’ve seen in quite a while. All the ingredients are easily pronounceable, natural, and lacking the usual set of preservatives and high fructose corn syrup that infects a great many sauces. For those who want an all-natural BBQ sauce, it doesn’t get much better than this. That, plus if you take a peek at the nutritional information…it’s pretty low-calorie and low-carb as well.

All the conjecture about a product is simply all talk until you decide to use it. For this BBQ sauce, we kept it simple. With some boneless, skinless chicken breasts, we were going to do our best impression of grilled BBQ chicken on our swanky gas grill. Setting the flame on low, we set out to cook these up.

As these breasts if chicken were grilled nearly to completion, we slathered them with a couple coatings of this BBQ sauce and let them warm on the grill for a few minutes. It doesn’t take long for these to finish, and we had some yummy BBQ chicken breasts in about fifteen minutes worth of cooking time.

Taste: Smoky and a little bit sweet, this sauce is all about the flavor. Great BBQ flavor that doesn’t fall prey to being too sweet, and has just a tingle of heat. Diehard chileheads who have to have their BBQ sauces hot will likely wonder where the heat is, and this sauce is about a 3/10 on my personal heat scale. What it lacks in capsaicin heat will be rewarded with flavor, and this sauce does GREAT with chicken on the grill. An excellent sauce to with nearly any meat, and I see this going great with stuff either on the grill or in the oven. Heck, it works well like a condiment for sandwiches or dipping or whatever else suits your purposes.

Overall recommendation: One of the healthier BBQ sauces that we’ve come across, and one we’d gladly use again. Not hot & spicy enough for some, but good enough for other, milder palates. In fact, we’d love to see Kelly come out with a similar sauce that used a little bit of habanero in place of the cayenne. At any rate, it’s a BBQ sauce that’s well worth trying. Give it a try for yourself. Enjoy!

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