So, today, I was at Dollar General (don't ask!)
Anyway, I have a bunch of beef brisket left over from my wildcat brisket thang and I thought, "I sure could use some BBQ sauce when I microwave this stuff the next couple of days. Maybe I could get a cheap sauce here and spice it up the way I like since I'm going to be feasting on my brisket for the next couple of days and I don't have any sauce in the house".
So I found a sauce that was $1.25 for a 20 oz bottle. My thought was, "If it's nasty, I just toss it. No great loss. If it's mediocre, I can tweak it".
It's Clover Valley "Original BBQ Sauce".
First of all, my brisket microwaves up nicely at 30 sec in a ziplock bag. It's surprisingly good.
But, more importantly, the sauce is tasty. As is. Better than mediocre, that's for sure. Mind you, it's not mind-blowingly good. It's not the best thing since sliced bread. However, I thought that it was very tasty and I didn't even bother to adulterate it. I just poured it over the beef and went to town.
I've eaten over a quarter bottle of it just pouring it over the brisket. It's a sweet BBQ sauce with a nice hit of vinegar up front and then mellowing out into a typical sweet Mid-South BBQ sauce. It's not very spicy and I'm sure that I'm going to hit it up with some of my Pyromainia or Baboon's *** hot sauce before I empty the bottle (I have about 12 different hot sauces in the house right now, including a rather dangerous Mad Dog .357 sauce with 600,000 Scoville units - yeah, I could go much further, but why bother when just a knife tip's portion of this will light you up like a Christmas tree?). However, as is, it's a well-balanced sauce that was tasty right out of the bottle. Sure, it's got guar gum, modified food starch and high fructose corn syrup. Whadda want for $1.25?
If you don't like sweet BBQ sauces, it might not be for you. However, I think that this sauce would form a good base for experimentation. Certainly, the price is right.
Oh yeah, I said microwave. So shoot me. Turns out that 30 seconds in the microwave was just fine for reheating this pulled and sliced brisket. Never let it be said that I'm a stickler for "right". If it works, it works.