Give Meatloaf A Bold Flavor Boost When You Smother It In This Bottled Sauce

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Meatloaf is more than just a hearty and comforting dish, it's also a great platform to showcase your creativity. While the core components remain the same — ground beef, onions, garlic, ketchup, anything savory leftover in the refrigerator — there's a long list of unexpected ingredients that can go into a meatloaf. From hard-boiled eggs to quick oats, there are many ways to deliver a surprise, but if it's a bold flavor boost you're looking for, reach for a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue Sauce.

While this isn't the most popular barbecue sauce on supermarket shelves, finishing a middling seventh when we ranked 15 popular barbeque sauce brands, it works well with meatloaf. As far as barbecue sauces go, Sweet Baby Ray's is on the sweeter side, with a hint of smokiness, and just the right amount of vinegar. And while it didn't win any points for inventiveness in our rankings, there are fans online who swear by the sweet notes it adds to meatloaf. On two separate forums, people spoke of successful experiments where they switched out the ketchup for Sweet Baby Ray's. 

"Sweet Baby Ray's added [in the] last 15 minutes as a glaze is awesome," one cook said on Smoking Meat Forums. On a pipes magazine thread, one cook said they used it as a ketchup substitute, noting that "it turned out pretty amazing."

Sweet Baby Ray's even has a specific barbecue-glazed meatloaf recipe on its website, which suggests using the sauce in two ways — half mixed into the meat mix and the rest slathered over the meatloaf as a glaze. Another recipe says to combine the barbecue sauce with ketchup and honey. Instead of mixing it in with the beef, this one recommends spreading half the sauce on top of the loaf before putting it in the oven, and then using the rest as a sweet, sticky glaze once the meatloaf is cooked. Among other things, the sauce's ingredient list includes pineapple juice concentrate, so expect those flavors to come through as well.

If you're not a fan of its original barbecue sauce, Sweet Baby Ray's has a host of other options that might interest the experimental chef in you. For example, the brand has a Sweet & Spicy sauce if you want to add some heat, or a Hickory & Brown Sugar sauce if you want to add more robust, smoky notes to your meatloaf.

You can also use Sweet Baby Ray's sauces to give your meatloaf a Cowboy-style upgrade, which calls for the addition of cheese, barbecue sauce and savory spices. While the spices go into the mince, the barbecue sauce is used as a glaze. Hot, melted cheese bubbles on top of it to complete an upgrade that makes dinner 10 times more flavorful.