Bachelor on the Cheap

By Mike Thayer

What is the most popular thing to add to meats cooked outdoors?

BBQ Sauces

It’s true, the most popular thing to add to the plethora of meats cooked outdoors is BBQ sauce. If you had guessed ketchup, believe it or not, you would be wrong.

The person who invented BBQ sauce is unknown, but whoever he was, he was a genius! References to the sauce started appearing in 17th century English and French literature about the formation of the American colonies. The rest is history and boy has BBQ sauce been kicked up a notch with all kinds of flavors and varieties created over the last 400+ years!

A traditional flavoring for pork, beef and chicken, sauce can range from watery to thick, from being heavy on the vinegar to being loaded with spice. Ranging in flavor from sugary to savory, to HOT!, heck, there’s even mustard and mayonnaise based BBQ sauces. It’s a regional thing, there’s Carolina BBQ; Tennessee whiskey BBQ; Texas BBQ; and the favorite of many, Kansas City Style BBQ.

What is your favorite, do you like sweet, tangy, KC style, Carolina style?  Have you tried enough variety to know?

I've sampled a lot of different sauces in recent weeks, making comparisons and soon I'll be letting you know what I think the cream of the crop is. Will it be KC Masterpiece? Sweet Baby Ray's? Stubbs? Something else?

In my first tasting challenge, I sampled KC Masterpiece and Sweet Baby Ray's.  You can read that review here.

Today, I'm sampling Bullseye Everyday Original.

This is a Kraft Foods product with a slightly different list of ingredients than Kraft Original and it's only slightly better.  High Fructose Corn Syrup is the first ingredient listed and it is a sweet sauce in the KC BBQ style.  What separates it from Kraft Original is a higher measure of vinegar, which helps to offset the sweetness.  This used to be THE bbq sauce used by Burger King, but they dumped Bullseye in favor of Sweet Baby Rays.  That was a good move by Burger King, Sweet Baby Rays is a much better sauce.

Costing me just $1 at Dollar Tree for a 17.5 ounce bottle, it's a bargain basement price but it's also a sauce that's finishes in the lower end of the bbq sauce spectrum. Despite the extra dose of vinegar, this sauce is just too sweet and gets just 2 out of 5 Bachelor on the Cheap stars.