Sauce

There’s no easier way to toast a marshmallow than by cheating with bottled smoke. This recipe takes a jar of old-school marshmallow cream blended with heavy cream, real vanilla, and smoke to make a modern miracle. Use it as you would any vanilla sauce with fresh fruits or berries, over ice cream, or in tandem with our cheater chocolate and caramel smoked dessert sauces.

Surprise, a touch of bottled smoke is the easy route to burnt sugar flavor in caramel sauce. This melt-and-stir cheater sauce eliminates the intimidating and time-consuming step of caramelizing sugar—cooking white sugar slowly in a skillet until it turns toasty brown.

Remember that chocolate is made by roasting, so why not combine a few drops of smoke with supermarket chocolate chips? That got us thinking about coffee, which also matches well with smoke and chocolate. Instant coffee is possibly the bottled smoke of coffee. Way before designer coffeehouses, instant coffee was the hot ticket. It’s just dehydrated coffee in a granulated form. It may not be your favorite for sipping, but it is a mighty useful pantry staple for adding undiluted coffee flavor to desserts.

Stephen Cellar, R. B.’s hungry nephew, asked R. B. where he got that awesome red sauce we had served with burgers at a family picnic. Having grown up in the sophisticated chipotle-buffalo-ranch-bruschetta drive-through era, Stephen didn’t recognize that good old twentieth-century American favorite, “special sauce.” When we grew up, McDonald’s special sauce on a Big Mac was the first condiment other than mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise that anyone considered for a burger. Way before pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, and made-up foreign-sounding food names, even the pedestrian “special sauce” was fancy enough to attract attention. How long did it take us to figure out that it was just like Thousand Island dressing? The mystery ingredient was chili sauce, that misnamed cousin to ketchup shelved beside the cocktail sauces. It looks and tastes like ketchup, but not quite as sweet or silky smooth and without any apparent chili flavor. For a fancy presentation, serve bunless chopped-steak burgers alongside crisp iceberg wedges and ripe tomato slices adorned with thinly sliced red onion, crumbled bacon, and Fridge Door Special Sauce. Or, slather over burgers topped with lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun. It’s so old, it’s new again.

Three thousand miles from the Atlantic, California sauces welcome Asian influences. Honey, ginger, soy, citrus, and Asian hot pepper sauce mingle with ketchup.

Eastern North Carolina’s pungent vinegar sauce is accented with black pepper notes and a light sweetness, but no tomato. Because it works so well with pulled pork, its popularity has traveled way beyond the region.

Moving through the Plains toward the Southwest, the sauce flattens out with more tomato, less vinegar, and a touch of chili on the horizon.