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Business Insider
4 days ago
- General
- Business Insider
I ranked 4 store-bought barbecue sauces. My favorite was also the least expensive.
I ranked four different store-bought barbecue sauces from worst to best. They all paired well with chicken nuggets, though some were thicker and more flavorful than others. I liked the barbecue sauces from Sweet Baby Ray's the most, including the no-sugar-added variety. Barbecue season is here, so I made it my mission to find out which brand delivers the tastiest barbecue sauce straight from the bottle. I tried store-bought barbecue sauces from three different brands to determine which offered the smokiest, tangiest flavor for the best value. I also tried one brand's no-sugar-added version to see if it could measure up to the original. While barbecue isn't typically my go-to sauce for all things dipping — proud ranch fan, here — I tried each of the sauces on their own and with chicken nuggets to see which sauce was my favorite. Here's how I'd rank four store-bought barbecue sauces, from worst to best. My least favorite barbecue sauce was Kraft's slow-simmered original barbecue sauce. The sauce is made with ingredients like tomato, molasses, and hickory smoke. It cost $4.19 for an 18-ounce bottle at my local Key Food supermarket in Brooklyn, New York. The sauce wasn't as thick as the other brands I tried. The sauce was light and tangy, but it didn't have a strong enough flavor for me. Compared to the other brands, I thought this barbecue sauce was lacking. I typically go for a thick, smoky barbecue sauce, and this was much lighter. I think I would struggle to fully coat chicken or ribs in this more viscous sauce, though I did enjoy the flavor. It was tangy and slightly sweet, with a honey-like flavor, but reminded me more of a sweet-and-sour sauce than a true barbecue sauce. I also tried KC Masterpiece's American Original barbecue sauce. The sauce is made from molasses, onions, and spices to deliver an authentic Kansas City-style barbecue sauce. Aside from any store discounts, this barbecue sauce was the cheapest I tried. An 18-ounce bottle cost $2.89 at my local Key Food supermarket in Brooklyn, New York. KC Masterpiece's was the thickest sauce I tried. I thought this sauce was a good balance of smoky and sweet. The sauce had a robust, smoky flavor and a consistency that easily clung to the chicken nugget, making for a balanced bite that overtook my tastebuds. It was really sweet, very much tasting of molasses. However, I was missing that slight tangy flavor that would have really taken this sauce over the edge and provided a more dynamic flavor profile. Up next was the Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce with no added sugar. Before this taste test, I was already familiar with Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. The brand has been cited as the top-selling barbecue sauce in the US, so this sauce had a lot to live up to, especially since it had no added sugar, which I worried would weaken the flavor. An 18.5-ounce bottle cost $4.89 at my local Key Food, making it the most expensive sauce I tried. The sauce had a balanced consistency. It wasn't too thick or too watery. I was really impressed by the flavor. It was sweet without being overpowering. Overall, this sauce nailed it for me. It was tangy but not sickly sweet, and it had a balanced consistency in terms of texture. I definitely got the smoky flavor without the overpowering molasses flavor I tasted in the KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce. It was also the lowest-calorie sauce of the ones I tried, with 15 calories per serving. However, when it came down to price, it was beaten out by the original version. My favorite barbecue sauce was Sweet Baby Ray's original barbecue sauce. It perhaps comes as no surprise that this sauce was my favorite. After all, the brand has won awards at various barbecue competitions for its sauce. An 18-ounce bottle cost $2 at my local Key Food after a markdown of $1.89, making it the least expensive barbecue sauce I tried. The sauce had a rich, red color and a similar consistency to the no-sugar-added version. It was just a touch less thick than the other sauce from Sweet Baby Ray's, but it still managed to coat the chicken nugget easily. In my opinion, this was the best sauce for dipping. Sweet Baby Ray's original barbecue sauce struck the perfect balance for me. The sauce had a slightly acidic, tart flavor that balanced out the sweet notes and an undercurrent of earthy flavor that made me feel like I was at a backyard barbecue. Next time I'm firing up the grill for some barbecue ribs or just need a dipping sauce for my nuggets or chicken tenders, I know exactly which barbecue sauce I'm grabbing.
New York Times
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Cutting Ties Is the Best Thing a Child Can Do
It was sometime during the bottomless scroll of quarantine that I started seeing the phrase 'no contact' — not referring to social-distance measures but a drastic way to end relationships with nettlesome exes or even one's parents. I found it even more chilling than the now canonical term 'ghosting.' With ghosts at least there's a faint outline, perhaps a Casperish friendliness, the humorous possibility that they might reappear with a 'Boo!' or get busted by a proton pack. But 'no contact'? Ever again? It seemed so punitive, so final, so cold. And yet maybe the healthiest thing you could do for yourself, urges Eamon Dolan in his persuasive new book, 'The Power of Parting.' This byline piqued my interest immediately. Dolan is not your typical self-help author, a clinician or celebrity — other than in the hothouse world of Manhattan publishing, where he has edited big best sellers including 'Fast Food Nation' and Mary L. Trump's tell-all about her Uncle Donald. Indeed, he looked for professional writers to take on this subject before deciding with trepidation to do it himself, consulting psychologists, the thin research on estrangement (most of which focuses on reconciliation) and fellow survivors of ghastly upbringings. Dolan's childhood in the Bronx was Dickensian. His father, the eldest of 11, worked long hours at the phone company and was hardly around. He died at 63, 'from cigarettes and, I now realize, sadness,' Dolan writes. His mother, Teresa, emerges as a classic villain. 'You only have one mother,' she'd tell him, and he'd mutter, 'Thank God!' She regularly pummeled Eamon and his two siblings with a long-handled wooden spoon, sometimes announcing with delight that these 'beating sticks' were on sale at Key Food. She actually fed them cold gruel. After 9-year-old Eamon pleaded to get XLerator racing cars for Christmas, she gave him an accordion cruelly housed in an XLerator-sized box, then shamed him for not being grateful and demanded he learn to play the instrument for visitors. Heat and hot water were strictly rationed in the Dolan home; in adulthood, a proper shower is among the six pleasures he's able to name after his therapist requests a list of 10. Dolan grew up to be hypervigilant; when good things happen to him, he gets a kind of vertigo. Seeing a 'You've got this!' sign when running in the park, he thinks, endearingly: 'Whatever 'this' is, I haven't got it.' When he decided to major in English literature at his top-choice college, his mother scoffed that it was useless: 'What are you going to do with that? Open an English store'; now he thinks, 'Yeah, bitch. That's exactly what I did.' (Making a living publishing books is absolutely a triumph, and yet I was surprised to find this deeply literate man relying so heavily on jargon du jour like 'toxic,' 'gaslight,' 'boundaries' and 'late capitalism.') Dolan's beloved brother and ally, Tommy, made scapegoat of the family, died in a car crash in 1999. After Teresa succumbed to Covid in 2020, his sister, Gerry, proclaimed, 'Ding, dong, the witch is dead!' and they laughed. But the matriarch had been disappeared from his life long before that, after violating his carefully set-out rules for engagement. The liberation he felt after cutting her off was — what's the opposite of intoxicating? Purifying. Dolan is a dad and husband himself. But he argues that Christianity has glorified the nuclear family to an unhealthy extent, given how many tormentors, statistically, are close relations, and implores for community safeguards. 'None of us should be imprisoned by the cosmic lottery that placed us in an abusive home,' he writes. He points out that 'the only legal form of assault in any American state is' — incredibly — 'hitting your child.' Gen Xers with their latchkeys and rusty bicycles mock today's trend of 'gentle parenting' but 'The Power of Parting' reminds that the norms of yesteryear were harsh to the point of harm, ignored by institutions and normalized in pop culture. Archie Bunker nicknamed his son-in-law Meathead; the Dolan kids were regularly called Amadan — 'Irish for 'fool.'' In the absence of sufficient atonement for such trespasses, Dolan suggests, forgiveness is overrated and in some cases 'see ya wouldn't want to be ya' is exactly what the doctor should order. One adult child, visiting her brain-dead father after 15 years of not talking to him, resumed contact with a bang. 'I punched him in the arm!' she tells Dolan. 'I dug my fingers into his skin at one point.' 'The Power of Parting' is an intellectually rigorous manifesto, a green light for reasonable limits that sometimes, with gleeful blunt force, flares red.
