(upbeat music)
- Today, we're go talk about coffee barbecue sauce,
which I know might be controversial for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I did make a video
called Stop Putting Coffee in Stuff
and this feels perhaps hypocritical,
but I would argue,
coffee barbecue sauce actually is a thing,
it has been a thing for a while
and it is worth talking about
from the perspective of good coffee, right?
That's the overview,
that's the idea of this video.
It's not just people
just ramming coffee into barbecue sauce, hopefully,
it's a bit more nuanced,
there's a kind of idea behind it.
I wanna have a little look at it anyway.
And secondly, there's the idea that I might act
as if I have something definitive to say about barbecue.
I don't, I'm not gonna give you
an ultimate recipe of any kind.
I know nothing about barbecue in the great scheme of things
and people have very strong opinions,
people are very passionate about barbecue,
and I'm not gonna come over here
and tell you how to make a barbecue sauce.
But I do wanna look at coffee barbecue sauce
and see what lessons can be learned
from the good coffee perspective, right?
That's the idea here.
If you wanna do this,
if you wanna make a coffee barbecue sauce,
what's the best way to get coffee into it?
What's the best way to have coffee shine as an ingredient?
That's the question I'm most interested in answering
because often, people just cram
the worst version of coffee into stuff,
and that makes me mad,
but can we get a good version of good coffee
into barbecue sauce?
Now, what I've got here
are four commercially available coffee barbecue sauces
because I need a kind of benchmark.
I wanna see what people think coffee does in these sauces,
how they're getting it in there.
There's a bunch of different approaches here,
so it just seemed sensible to have a little taste,
set some benchmark
before I head to the kitchen and experiment.
Three of these are from the US, one is from the UK.
This is Black Dust Coffee & Spice,
Small Batch Barbecue Sauce.
All of these seem to be
very traditional ketchup-based sauces,
probably quite sweet, a little smoky.
There'll be a bunch of cumin in all of them, I suspect.
Now, this one has ground coffee in it.
So, I'm kind of curious to see
what that does.
I'm not a huge fan of ground coffee in my mouth
as that kind of texture thing,
but hey, let's give it a try.
The coffee here is more present
as a texture actually than as a flavor.
There's very strong tomato, acid, sugar, all up front first.
Coffee is really pretty subtle, dominated by the smoke.
A little heat, not too much.
It's a pleasant sauce, but not strongly coffee.
Now, the next one is from a Meat Co Lab.
It's Dirty Barbie Espresso and Bourbon Barbecue Sauce.
This is from the UK.
A little smokier,
a little less vinegar on the nose.
So this, very sweet,
not much coffee at all.
Really quite subtle,
maybe adding a little bit of kind of earthiness
in that regard,
but certainly not an obvious coffee presence in this sauce.
Much sweeter, not much bourbon either.
That's not a complaint, it's nice,
it's just quite sweet for me.
Let's move on.
Now, this comes from the Roasterie in Kansas City.
This looks, again, like ground coffee has gone in there.
Let's have a look.
Espresso grounds and cocoa powder, interesting.
So, they're really going for that
kind of a Maillardy flavor spectrum, I guess.
Oh, that's quite different.
Now, that smells like more of a dark roast to me.
Again, pretty sweet, a nice little bit of heat,
pretty nice balance.
There's this deep kind of heavy base to this sauce
that's kind of interesting,
that I think is that kind of chocolate, coffee,
like darker roast heavy sort of a thing.
Definitely an interesting sauce,
just like a much richer bassier kind of sauce overall.
Last up is a Coffee Barbecue Sauce
from Torchbearer Sauces.
So, the interesting thing about this sauce
is that number one on the ingredients list
is fresh brewed coffee.
That is the primary component of this sauce.
I'm intrigued by this one.
This feels like a...
Should be a very coffee-forward sauce.
But let's have a look.
And it's still got some thickness to it.
Okay, there's definitely coffee there.
Some nice heat coming in, coming in strong.
Yeah, nicely spicy.
Okay.
This one is by far the most interesting to me
because you can see what the coffee is doing.
Like it's really,
it's the centerpiece of the sauce
and everything else kind of bolts on the side of it,
whereas these feel like tomato-based sauces,
ketchup-based sauces,
that have a little coffee kind of woven through it.
That is interesting.
Now, that's quite spicy
and if you're gonna use it as a mop sauce,
you're gonna put a lot of this on there, I guess.
So, that would be a spicy affair,
but it's interesting to taste coffee at the heart of things.
So, what I'm gonna do now is this,
I'm gonna go and make a pretty simple basic sauce
that's very similar to these ones here
and then add coffee to it in four different ways.
We're gonna add it as ground coffee,
we're gonna add it as specialty instant coffee,
we're gonna add it as espresso coffee
and we're gonna add it as brewed coffee.
Now, each of those will have
a slightly different effect on the sauce,
but I'll be interested to see
which way of adding coffee
lets it shine in and amongst the other ingredients
and what we can learn from doing it.
Let's go.
So, I have here four sauces
that are the result of today's experiment
and the base of them is all the same, right?
So as I said, I put together
a very simple tomato ketchup-based barbecue sauce.
And I know you would have a lot of opinions
about what's the right sauce, anything like that,
but I wanted something that tasted like barbecue sauce
that was pretty neutral tasty
that I could kind of let the coffee do its thing in
to understand how coffee changed that kind of thing.
But you can see how it was made,
put together super simply,
cooked down a little bit, not too much,
just like five minutes on the hub, I think, was plenty,
but four different iterations of coffee.
One of them, we used some instant coffee.
We used about three and a half grams
of specialty instant that I quite like,
as a specialty instance go.
There's about three grounds, I think,
of soluble material in there.
So, that was that one.
Two, to match that, I put about
10 grams of kind of flour-fine ground coffee into one,
which was really interesting.
Now, that's a bit more soluble material, I know,
but sort of it was a best guess.
But that was definitely weird,
that the coffee just soaked up the moisture really quickly
and surprisingly if I thought about it,
but interesting nonetheless.
So, that one's not gonna be difficult to find
in the blind tasting.
Then we took some espresso and we added that in.
So, like 18 to 36 as a kind of brew recipe.
That went in about three grams of soluble material
and then a strong cup of coffee brewed on the switch
at a hundred grams a liter,
kind of a mocker pot ratio for kind of strong coffee.
And then, that sauce had to be cooked down a little bit more
to sort of reduce it
to the similar sort of texture of the others here.
And then, these have all been mixed up,
even though I can tell one very easily,
the other three, a little bit more of a challenge.
Color, there's more variance with the exception of one,
but what about taste?
Which way is the best way to get coffee into barbecue sauce?
Let's have a taste.
That's pretty good.
That's doing what I think coffee should be doing
in a barbecue sauce,
which is just kind of rounding things out,
giving some nice base to it.
Really the heat,
the spice is the kind of dominant physical feeling,
slightly balanced off by the bitterness of the coffee
and a little acidity from the vinegar.
That's pretty good.
Let's try this one.
This one is not bad.
The coffee is there, it's a little bit more subtle
and actually a little bit more bitter,
but it's not bad,
it's just not as good as this one here.
That one has to be the one that we cooked for awhile
'cause it's got that kind of cooked down
hot plate coffee taste to it.
The coffee is definitely a distraction,
rather than an addition to the sauce.
Lastly, well, this is the ground coffee one, obviously.
I'm not gonna surprise anyone with that.
I'll hear your argument
that I put too much coffee and ground too finely,
but if it was less coffee
or coarsely ground or whatever else,
the way that it's added flavor is fundamentally not good.
It's bad.
I don't think putting ground coffee in the sauce
is remotely, remotely a good idea.
We should do the reveal
and talk about the things that we've learnt today,
but first, a short ad for this video's sponsor,
which is Surfshark.
Surfshark is a fast, easy to use VPN service
that's easy to install
and can run on unlimited devices.
With some of us starting to think about traveling again,
that's where historically
VPNs have been really useful for me.
You can be anywhere in the world
and have your computer or your phone act
as if it's back in London where I am now.
Plus it adds one more layer of privacy and security
to my browsing when I'm out and about.
But it isn't just for travel,
it's also super useful for all streaming services.
Lots of them lock different content down
by different regions.
So, you can unlock all of that
from the comfort of your own home, your own sofa.
You can be watching Netflix as if you're in Sweden
or the US or the UK,
depending on what it is that you wanna see.
Now, Surfshark have an app
on just about every single platform,
Mac, PC, Linux, Android, iOS,
every device you have is covered.
And with a single subscription,
you can use unlimited devices,
which I think is excellent.
You can set up a Surfshark in the link down below,
or you can get a Surfshark.deal/JamesHoffman
and use code James Hoffman for 83% off
and three months extra free.
And what's more, they do a 30-day money back guarantee,
so you've got lots of time to check it out risk-free.
Thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video.
Okay, let's go in reverse order,
starting with the worst one.
Yap, no surprises,
that was the one we added ground coffee to.
That was terrible.
That's one of the worst things I've ever made.
That's really bad.
I apologize for its existence, frankly.
This is what I thought it was,
which is the filter coffee,
the kind of strong filter coffee.
It just tastes cooked, you know what I mean?
Like hot plate, cooked, bad, harsh, wrong.
What's this one?
Now, this was the instant,
which is interesting.
That wasn't in any way bad
'cause the instant's quite good.
It worked quite well.
I think it just needed a little bit more.
It's interesting though
that this one know, by kind of default, is the best one,
that's the espresso.
I'm troubled by this idea,
but this might actually be better
than the sauce without the coffee
and that's kind of terrifying to me,
but interesting,
makes it definitely worth trying,
definitely worth trying.
Now, this is interesting
because it doesn't have
really that much more soluble material,
it doesn't have that much more flavor of coffee in it
than the instant,
but maybe the flavor benefits from being fresh
and not having been freeze dried.
It was cooked a little bit
after the coffee was added
just to reduce it a little bit more,
but it doesn't seem to have particularly damaged
the flavor of it
and that, I think, works really well.
That's an espresso roast, but it's not a dark roast,
it's a sort of on the cusp of medium, I guess,
roast for espresso.
In the world of modern specialty, it's medium.
But I think it just adds really nice roundness and base.
Now, I'm sort of annoyed that this is the winner
because having an espresso machine
is an annoying requirement to do this.
So, I would say, if you wanna spend a little bit of money
on a decent specialty instant,
that is certainly one to consider.
I wouldn't cheap out on the instant and use that
because I think that's just gonna add bad flavor
and very easily bad flavor can destroy everything here.
So, definitely stick to good quality specialty coffee,
but you can get it to come through
and have some of that complexity of great coffee,
some of the pleasant characteristics
of just that tickle a bit in this,
just that nice kind of sweet coffee flavor
and have it pair with barbecue sauce really nicely.
But now, I wanna hear from you.
Have you tried to make it a coffee barbecue sauce?
Will you try to make a barbecue sauce?
What base would you use?
What is your go-to barbecue sauce
that you might wanna put some espresso in?
Just reduce a little bit down just to get that consistency,
unless I guess you wanted to use it as like a mop sauce
and then you could go
a little bit more kind of watery, I guess.
But anyway, tell me what you're doing,
tell me what you're making.
I would love to hear from you down in the comments below.
For now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.
That is actually pretty good.
I'm impressed with that.