Run for the “East” Border BBQ Sauce

25 Aug Run for the “East” Border BBQ Sauce

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In the 1993 movie Demolition Movie, Sly Stallone is cryo-frozen and wakes up 40 years into the future in 2032 to find a society that runs out of toilet paper (much like today) and all restaurants have been replaced with taco bell, the only surviving restaurant after a doomsday… What a dream… Let’s be honest, don’t you wish you had more access to taco bell just so you can get your hands on more sauce packets to stash in your secret T Bell drawer? Just think of the endless hot, mild and fire sauces you can add to all of your homemade dishes…. But what do you do with the diablo sauce? I just tried it for the first time… and it was almost inedible. I contemplated throwing away all the diablo sauce I had, but didn’t have the heart for it… So I decided to experiment and make a T Bell-inspired BBQ sauce.

East meets T Bell.

I looked in my fridge and decided that I had the perfect ingredients to make an East Asian style BBQ sauce. The Diablo sauce is pretty much a very hot flavorless chili sauce. So, combining it with Asian flavors will work. A good BBQ sauce is slightly sweet but spicy, tangy, and thick. With this sauce, I decided to use some yellow gold tomatoes from my garden, garlic, ginger, hoisin sauce, tamari, rice vinegar and a little honey to go along with the diablo.

Build flavor, cook it down, and blend

In a sauce pan, I heated up some olive oil, and then added garlic. After 30 seconds or so, I zested ginger directly into the pan, and then added the chopped tomatoes. After a couple minutes, I started adding the other ingredients one by one. First went the hoisin sauce, then the tamari, rice vinegar, the diablo sauce packets, and a tablespoon of honey for that added sweetness. I cooked it on medium heat until the sauce began to thicken up, and then added the mix to my blender. I blended the mixture up to a medium setting, because I wanted to make it slightly chunky.

Savor the sauce

A good BBQ sauce is so versatile in that it could be used as a marinade to any vegetable or meat, a dipping sauce, or a condiment. I recently found out that you can purchase the popular Impossible meat (plant-based), at Trader Joe’s. I’ve had the Impossible burger before at restaurants, but in cooking it at home, I appreciated its cooking process. It cooks so much like a regular burger in that you form your patty, and cook it on both sides for a few minutes on high heat to get a nice sear, and then maybe cook it on medium heat for an additional 5-7 minutes depending on the temp you want it. In buying the ground Impossible meat, you can season it however you want, and since I’m a sucker for spices, I added cumin, chili powder, a little cayenne, paprika, and garlic powder along with salt and pepper. I had leftover chimichurri, so I decided to add that on a perfectly fried egg accompanied with some green onions and complimented by my new BBQ sauce. It was the best veggie burger I’ve ever had… Mic drops…

Recipe

Ingredients:
– 2 Taco Bell Diablo Sauce Packets
– Tomatoes (Handful of yellow gold cherry tomatoes)
– 3-4 cloves of garlic chopped
– 1/2 cup of Hoisin Sauce
– 1 tablespoon of tamari
– 1 teaspoon of rice vinegar
– 1 tablespoon of honey
– Ginger
– Olive oil

1. Chop up your tomatoes, garlic and ginger (I just use a zester for ginger)
2. In a sauce pan, heat oil on medium heat, add garlic and after 30-60 seconds, add ginger.
3. After about a minute with the ginger, add hoisin sauce, then tamari, rice vinegar and diablo sauce.
4. After a minute or so, add honey, and continue to stir.
5. After a few minutes, your mixture should start to thicken up. Add mix to a blender and blend to your desired consistency.
6. Bottle it up and enjoy with your favorite meat or plant-based protein!