The Best Store-Bought BBQ Sauces That Are Great Right Out of the Bottle

Though purists will no doubt scoff, bottled barbecue sauce is not some great sin unto the world. Many of the best options are simplified versions of sauces made by pitmasters you or I could never hope to match.

But like most goods previously made in the home, store-bought sauce can also suck. Sometimes terribly so. The trap many fall into is excess in one of the four pillars of barbecue-sauce flavor — heat, smokiness, tanginess and, the most commonly abused, sweetness. We scoured the web, grocery stores and barbecue forums to find out which retail-available, bottled barbecue sauces are actually worth putting on the meat you’ve spent all day smoking.

What Is Barbecue Sauce

Despite the best efforts of the bottom-shelf BBQ sauces at the supermarket, barbecue sauce is more than just sweet and smoky ketchup. In fact, it’s far more than a monolith, with a wide range of styles originating in various regions throughout the (mostly southern) United States. But what they all share in common is a contrasting mix of sweet, spicy, smoky and tangy flavors that makes them the perfect complement to grilled and smoked meats.

Although people have been using similar sauces and marinades to cook meat since long before there was a United States of America, the BBQ sauce that we know and love got its start in the American South during the Colonial Period. It was there that a disparate collection of ingredients from around the world came together — vinegar and salt from Spain, tomatoes from South America, sugar and molasses from the Caribbean and chile peppers from Central America — and began to be mixed in various ways. Those combinations became honed over the ensuing decades (and a couple of centuries) to eventually transform into the variety of sauces we use today.

Types of Barbecue Sauce

Kansas City Style

The most widely available style of barbecue sauce at grocery stores is at its best a balanced mix of tomato (ketchup, most of the time), sweetness, tang and smoke. This is the gloopy reddish-brown sauce you slather all over ribs — it’s great for its strong hold to meats and overall body as well.

Texas Style

Sometimes called “mop sauce” or “mop style,” these are sauces with a tomato and vinegar base. They’re typically much lighter in body than KC-style sauces, but not as light as a Carolinian vinegar sauce. They’re also applied with a lighter hand than most sauces, and feature lots of garlic, black pepper and Worcestershire sauce.

Memphis Style

Memphis barbecue tends to be served sans sauce, but there has been an uptick in Memphis-style barbeque sauces. The sauce is similar to a Kansas City-style barbeque sauce but with a richer sweetness thanks to molasses and a tad more brightness from a generous addition of vinegar.

Lexington Style (Western North Carolina)

Though some of North Carolina’s population may protest, this is essentially an earlier version of the uber-popular Kansas City sauce, sans-spiciness and with a lot more tomato product. If you don’t like the spiciness and bite that comes with a lot of KC sauces, this style is for you.

East North Carolina Vinegar-Based

It’s vinegar, pepper, salt and pepper flakes. The most fluid sauce there is gets most of its flavor from the tart vinegar and various pepper flakes and pepper powders added (cayenne being the most common). It may not be all that useful in caramelizing the outside of a pig, but it’s still delicious.

Japanese Style

While not a traditional part of American barbecue culture, Japanese BBQ sauce makes for an excellent substitution when you’re looking to mix things up. The thin and runny sauce is rich with umami flavor thanks to its base of soy sauce and mirin complemented by heavy doses of ginger and garlic.

How We Tested

Amazon

Best Overall Barbecue Sauce

Stubb’s Original BBQ Sauce

• $4.00 at Amazon

• Style: Texas
• Size: 18 oz

Though Texans aren’t prone to using sauces in the first place, Stubb’s Texas-style original sauce is as good as anyone can hope for out of a bottle. The first thing you’ll notice is that it is decidedly unsweet for a bottled sauce. It also has zero high fructose corn syrup and doesn’t use any artificial ingredients. Stubb’s opts instead for a tomato- and vinegar-forward sauce that’s way less overpowering than most things from a bottle.

Our tester found this to be as close to homemade as a shelf-borne BBQ sauce can get. It’s thick and even a little chunky, and both smells and looks like crushed tomatoes. It’s also delicious and tastes like “good BBQ,” the kind you might get from a restaurant in Austin with a line around the block. The more of it you eat, the more smokiness and spiciness you’ll begin to feel, but the sauce itself is not what you’d describe as particularly smoky or spicy. It is simply balanced, as all sauces should be.

Walmart

Best Budget Barbecue Sauce

Bull’s-Eye Original BBQ Sauce

• $2.00 at Walmart

• Style: Kansas City
• Size: 18 oz

Though a bit heavier in high fructose corn syrup than you’d like, Bull’s Eye’s sauce is a great grocery store sauce pickup. Serious Eats, Cooks Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen spoke of it too, but the sauce is as balanced as it gets without making it yourself — it sits in the middle on the sweetness scale, it’s smokier than most store-bought bottles, it’s not overly spicy (but isn’t boring) and it has enough body to cling to whatever you baste it to. If you can get past the ingredient list, it’s great.

Amazon

Best Upgrade Barbecue Sauce

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Sensuous Slathering Sauce

• $21.00 at Amazon
  $23.00 (7% off)

• Style: Texas
• Size: 19 oz

Not as widely available as the others on this list, but a treat if you can find it — Sensuous Slathering sauce is one of the lowest-sugar bottled sauces out there and, frankly, it doesn’t need it. It gets a bit of augmented sweetness from bell pepper and it’s wickedly smokey and tangy. The consistency is such that it’s ready to baste right out of the bottle. There’s no corn syrup of any kind in it and you can probably pronounce every ingredient in its makeup.

Walmart

Best Smoky Barbecue Sauce

Jack Daniel’s Original No. 7 Recipe Barbecue Sauce

• $5.00 at Walmart

• Style: Kansas City
• Size: 19.5 oz

This is as smoky a sauce as you’ll find in a bottle, but not so much it drowns other flavors out; it’s fairly peppery and has a lot of body as well. If you like super-sweet sauces, this one might not be for you — though a quick simmer with a bit of honey and butter might do the trick.

Amazon

Best Spicy Barbecue Sauce

Rufus Teague Blazin’ Hot Sauce

• $13.00 at Amazon

• Style: Kansas City
• Size: 15.25 oz

It’s not that hot, which is just what it ought to be. Rufus Teague’s sauces are typically well-balanced and non-destructive to your health. They’re also available in grocery stores across the country. This one is made with totally natural ingredients (read: no high fructose corn syrup) and contains more interesting ingredients than most sauces do, homemade or bottled. The heat stems from chili peppers and chipotles, but it isn’t an overly aggressive burn. If the burn proves too much, consider tossing a couple pats of butter into a saucepan with it.

Amazon

Best Sweet Barbecue Sauce

Sweet Baby Ray’s Original Barbecue Sauce

• $9.00 at Amazon
  $11.00 (20% off)

• Style: Kansas City
• Size: 18 oz

Readily available in basically every grocery store and listing high-fructose corn syrup as its number-one ingredient, Sweet Baby Ray’s is never going to win over the BBQ snobs and gourmands. However, if you’re looking for a crowd-pleasing sauce, this is it. There is a reason why everyone knows this sauce: it tastes good. It’s your prototypical KC-style BBQ sauce that’s thick, dark and plenty sweet.

Our tester can see why it’s popular, especially among sweet tooths. The sweetness is very forward here — 17g of sugar per 2 Tbsp — but luckily it’s offset by a good amount of tang and a little smoke (no discernible spiciness here). It’s a little more complex than it gets credit for, thanks in part to some unexpected ingredients like pineapple juice and tamarind, that latter helping provide some of the tanginess.

Amazon

Best Barbecue Sauce for Brisket

Bone Suckin’ Sauce

• $20.00 at Amazon

• Style: Lexington
• Size: 16 oz

A bit sweeter than your usual fare, to the point it might remind you of a sweet and sour sauce. Fortunately, sweet and sour sauce is delicious, and this one has the added benefit of a mild hickory smoke flavor that manages to not taste like chemicals. It is a bit thinner than KC-style sauce, so if you want it to stick to ribs consider cooking it down for a few minutes on the stove.

Amazon

Best Barbecue Sauce for Ribs

Lillie’s Q Smoky Barbeque Sauce

• $22.00 at Amazon

• Style: Memphis
• Size: 21 oz

Lillie’s Q is a Chicago-based barbecue restaurant with roots in Southern cooking. The brand’s barbecue sauces have made their way into supermarkets, so they’ve become easier to track down. The Smoky sauce is a Memphis-style barbecue sauce with a molasses-like sweetness complemented by a delightful smokiness. This sauce works well on pretty much anything, but Lillie’s Q recommends eating it with ribs and smoked chicken.

Amazon

Best Barbecue Sauce for Pulled Pork

Traeger ‘Cue BBQ Sauce

• $10.00 at Amazon

• Style: Kansas City
• Size: 19.5 oz

If you use the Traeger app for recipes, you might notice it calls for Traeger BBQ sauces quite often. The sauce’s consistency makes it versatile as a dip, marinade or glaze, and the addition of anchovy gives the sauce a savory umami flavor. This particular variety of Traeger BBQ sauce has hickory smoke flavoring, which is meant to pair well with Traeger hickory pellets.

Walmart

Best Japanese Barbecue Sauce

Bachan’s Original Japanese Barbecue Sauce

• $19.00 at Walmart

• Style: Kansas City
• Size: 18 oz

Traditional BBQ this is not, but it is certainly delicious. Bachan’s is billed as the original Japanese BBQ sauce, and it’s quite unlike any of its American counterparts. It’s very liquidy, not much thicker than soy sauce, so it’s not something you’ll be slathering over ribs or anything like that. But if you’re looking for a thinner sauce, the flavor is next-level.

Our tester finds the taste a bit indescribable, but “umami” is probably the most apt term to use here. It’s sweet at first, but that quickly dissipates to a salty and rich earthiness that makes your mouth water. Out of all the sauces we tested, our tester found this one to be the most crave-worthy — once having a taste, he continually wanted more. It’s closer in taste to something like hoisin sauce than to KC Masterpiece, and will level up any meat dish.

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