Can You Eat Bbq Sauce Without Cooking It

Can you eat bbq sauce without cooking it

In this brief guide we will answer the query “can you eat bbq sauce without cooking it?”. We will also get to know more about this sauce and discuss some points about using it correctly in cooking.

Can you eat BBQ sauce without cooking it?

If the BBQ is on a bottle, then the answer is “YES”, it already suffered a thermal process and it is safe and ready to eat.

On the other hand, if you are making your own BBQ sauce, then the ingredients are raw and need to be cooked in order to eliminate microorganisms and to ensure food safety.

What are BBQ Sauce´s ingredients?

There are a lot of recipes for home-made BBQ sauce, but the most repeated ingredients are tomatoes (fresh or even ketchup), sugar, mostly brown sugar, vinegar, and olive oil, besides some spices. In some recipes, they use honey and cola in addition to sugar.

Because of the vinegar, the pH of the BBQ sauce is acidic, almost 4.5, so it is not an ideal environment for microorganisms to grow, but it is preferred to refrigerate the sauce after it is made, or in case it is in a bottle after the sauce is opened.

Other ingredients can be tequila, beer, maple syrup, corn starch syrup, and spices, besides garlic, salt, and pepper.

Do I need to cook the BBQ sauce if I make it at home?

Yes, if you are making your own BBQ sauce, you need to cook it, this will ensure food safety and also is an important step for the sauce to have that particular color, brown almost black color.

If you want a recipe for making BBQ sauce, you can check this one out.

If you buy BBQ sauce in the supermarket, in a bottle, you only need to heat it in order to enjoy it with the meat of your preference.

Why does the BBQ sauce have that brown color?

This has a chemical justification. The BBQ sauce has sugars on it´s ingredients, sugar (saccharose), honey or even cola, so the sugars, when they melt at high temperatures, followed by boiling, they suffer a chemical reaction called caramelization.

Saccharose (sugar) decomposes into glucose and fructose. Then these sugars suffer more chemical transformations in order to produce a different type of molecules that give us that particular caramel color and that particular flavor. Those main molecules can be divided into three groups:

Caramelans
Caramelens
Caramelins

So, you need to cook all the ingredients when you are making your own sauce, not only for food safety but because heating the sugars will give your sauce that particular color and sweet caramel flavor.

Can I use BBQ sauce as a marinade?

BBQ sauce is a sauce and should be used as a glaze, not as a marinade. Why? We already explained what happens to sugars when they are exposed to high temperatures.

Although in the making of the sauce it is desired to have the chemical reaction of sugar´s caramelization when you heat the sugars in excess, you can have as a result, some other not desired molecules, that can compromise the flavor and your health.

So, when you marinate your meat with BBQ sauce and then cook it on the grill or in the frying pan, yes, you are cooking the meat, but you are also heating in excess the BBQ sauce, and you will have those unwanted molecules.

Do I put the BBQ sauce before or after cooking meat?

It is better if first of all, you cook your meat, no matter if it is chicken, pork or any other protein.

When you are sure, your meat has the right cooking point you want, then you can add the BBQ sauce. Let the sauce heat just a little, this will make the flavor of the sauce and the natural juice of the meat combine and you will have a really tasty BBQ dish.

Other FAQs about Sauces that you may be interested in.

Can you eat Dolmio sauce without cooking it?

Can you eat fish sauce without cooking?

Can you eat hollandaise sauce when pregnant?

Can you eat HP sauce when pregnant?

Conclusion

In this brief guide we have answered the query “can you eat bbq sauce without cooking it”. We also got to know more about this sauce and discussed some points about using it correctly in cooking.