Sometimes you might envy our Food Development meetings. We get to throw out ideas for new menu items, taste what Rolando’s been developing, and talk about how we can best represent seasonal ingredients on the menu. But sometimes we have to get down to real work and taste straight mayonnaise and BBQ sauce.
We make nearly everything ourselves. This is unheard of for fast-food, but it’s true. The 3 major exceptions to this rule are BBQ sauce, ketchup, and mayo. Chris has undertaken a project to research these shelf-stable products and make sure we’re getting the best-tasting products for the lowest prices. Right now we use Cattleman’s Classic for BBQ sauce. It’s a Kansas-city style BBQ sauce (so sweet, tangy, thick, not vinegar-y). Soon we’ll make our own BBQ sauce, but in the meantime, we tasted the entire product line of Ken’s BBQ, against our current sauce. Ken’s is made in Massachusetts. It’s a medium-sized company that services clam shacks, burger joints, and Whole Foods.
This was a blind tasting. Enzo couldn’t wait to find out which sauce was the “Sweet Baby Ray’s” sauce and which was the “Canonball” sauce, so he tore off the numbers before Chris was quite ready. Apparently these are both types of BBQ sauce, not brands.
