Hi, I'm looking for a recipe for a sauce that works well with pulled pork. As a poor college student, I've recently discovered the magic of using a crockpot to turn a pork roast into shredded tastiness. However, I can't seem to master the sauce part.

However, I have a really picky appetite. Every sauce recipe I've tried from the internet has ended up wrong - too sour, too sweet, too thick, the wrong kind of spicy, etc.

I'm looking for a recipe that fits these criteria:
-Spicy and savory are the flavors I really want in it, with a bit of tomato-ness.
-Very little sweetness.
-No sour/acidic flavor, like most vinegar-based sauces seem to have.
-Not too thin, not too thick. I don't like it watery, but I also don't like it as thick as toothpaste.

If anyone could post a good recipe (amounts would be helpful, as well as ingredients) that you think I'd like, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

You can experiment with this one to suit your tastes.

CHUCK’S BAR-B-QUE SAUCE

2½ cups catsup
¾ cups brown sugar
1½ cups chili sauce
1½ cups wine vinegar
1½ cups water
¾ can beer
¾ cup lemon juice
½ cup prepared mustard
½ tsp onion powder (or minced onion to taste)
1 Tbl celery seed
1 Tbl Worcestershire Sauce
2 Tbl soy sauce
2 cloves minced garlic

ground black pepper and hot sauce to taste

As picky as your sauce requirements seem to be, have you tried making your own. You need to experiment with what the various ingredients from the sauces bring to the table and then adjust for your taste.

Paul Kirk has a BBQ Sauce book that does a decent job of teaching the basics.

Spicy and savory: There are plenty of spices you can use to do this

Sweetness: just cut it out of the recipe (although I think you'll find you need some becuase it helps the flavor meld better)

Sour/acidic: That's going to be tough, as almost all BBQ sauce, with tomato will have an acidic PH, vinegar is pretty much a staple

Thin/thick: Cook it down if it's too thin until you get the consistency you want.

Like SmokinOkie said, most sauces have a ketchup base or something pretty close. If the acid level of ketchup isn't offset enough for your taste with the other likely ingredients, you could always start with tomato sauce as a base. Since theres no vinegar added, you can addd as much or as little as you see fit. Also, using less refined forms of sugar may help you control the sweetness. Strawberries, apples(or juice) and peaches can be added in almost any form to help with sweetness. Brown sugar, mollassas, or honey instead of white sugar. Try different vinegars to find one that works for you. I find white vinegar to be too strong for anything except pickles, but cider vinegar works well. You might try rice wine vinegar too, as it's has a lower acid level and mixes well with other ingredients.

I think making your own sauce will be the best way to go. I would try EZ Goins sauce, but I would delete everything from the chili sauce through the lemon juice to just make a base, then I would add the other items if you thought they were needed.

Try Bullseye original sauce. It is the most popular sauce in the country, and I think it's very neutral in the areas you mentioned. I also like Stubbs sauces, and the sauces from Cook Shack(which seem to be very similar) are excellent. You could order the CS dry sauce mix and tinker to your're happy.

Also, maybe you would like a non traditional sauce. I recently stumbled accross a sauce produced by Grace called Jamaican Jerk BBQ Sauce. I found it at a latin market of all places, but it has become a quick favorite. It's a little different than your typical American sauce, but it's good enough that I've gone through 4 bottles of it in just a few weeks, but it's better on chicken and goat than pork IMO.