Your Store-Bought BBQ Sauce Could Be So Much Better With This Sweet, Fruity Ingredient

Convenient at a pinch and good for hints of smoke in your cooking, but store-bought BBQ definitely couldn't hold a candle to homemade. If you've ever tasted genuine, made-from-scratch BBQ sauce, you'll find the grocery store version to be a lot more toned down and lack some characters to it. Good news: you don't have to use sad, weakly-flavored sauce. It could be much, much tastier with the addition of one ingredient: jam.

You heard that right, if you like your pulled pork on the sweet and vibrant side, try stirring a little bit of jam into your BBQ sauce — tomato or mustard-based will work best, as they give the jam a tangy base to work with, but really, any should work fine. That also goes for the jam. Really, the only limits are either what you have in your pantry right now and what you like. 

Orange marmalade, for instance, will give the sauce a nice combo of sweet, tangy, and citrusy. If you want your sauce sweeter, you can try something like peach preserves, instead. Feel free to experiment with different kinds of preserves and jams here. Each one will flavor your BBQ a different way, but all of them are certain to make it far less boring than when they're fresh out of the bottle!

After making your first batch of fruity BBQ sauce, you can use it as a sweet glaze for anything that can use a bit of smoke and fruitiness. A roasted leg of lamb, for instance, can be the perfect canvas — just swap out the sweet rum glaze in this recipe for your jam BBQ sauce. If you've decided on orange marmalade as your sauce-enricher, it can be a pretty good substitute for honey glazes in recipes such as honey-lacquered duck breast. The citrusy flavor that marmalade can add, just like orange juice, can help you cut through the meat's richness for a more balanced plate.

For fans of barbecued ribs? You can take a page from this sweet, spicy, smoky raspberry chipotle ribs recipe. In this recipe, we use fresh raspberries, adobo sauce, and other ingredients to make a sauce pan of barbecue sauce from scratch. Obviously, you can also swap it for store-bought BBQ sauce with a few teaspoons of raspberry jam stirred in. While it's not going to have the depth or complexity of the homemade version, if you need to table some ribs ASAP, it's not a bad way to save some time (especially when the ribs themselves are going to need four hours in the oven — you can shave off quite some precious time with this trick).

Apply the formula forward: anything that needs sweetness, be it in a glaze or as a cooking sauce, may be a good candidate for the fruit jam BBQ sauce treatment. Why "may"? Well, the only way to know for sure is experimenting!

When we chatted with barbecue expert Steven Raichlen for tips on how to upgrade store-bought BBQ sauce, he let us in on "Barbara's Barbecue Sauce" — his special recipe named after his wife. It's just store-bought barbecue sauce with orange marmalade and a touch of honey. That extra honey sweetens things up and mellows the bitter edge from the marmalade. If you're not a fan of the slight bitterness, this simple addition is your answer.

Another one is using a type of flavorful and aromatic liquor, such as bourbon, to give the fruity BBQ an extra boost. Should you choose to flavor your sauce with peach preserves, consider adding a dash of bourbon — just a teaspoon or two. The liquor's tasting notes of baking spice, vanilla, caramel, and honey will lend a degree of complexity to offset the in-your-face sweet and fruitiness of the preserve.

The point is: jam is just the starting point. Find a complementary ingredient in your pantry to pair with your preserve, and together they'll bring your sauce (and food) to entirely new levels.