First, the apologetics. Barbecue sauce is not a necessity—not even and maybe especially not even to the making of good barbecue, but also just in general: You do not really ever need barbecue sauce, except perhaps where you expect the meat clad in it to come out otherwise dry or bland or underwhelming, and you can and should expect more of your barbecue efforts than to assume their products will need this help.
Now let's drive back in the other direction a little bit. Barbecue sauce is fine! It tastes good and it's fun, and making it is easy, and even excellent barbecue certainly isn't harmed by the option of drizzling or brushing it with something tart and sweet and hot and sticky. If barbecue sauce is not a need-to-have type of thing, then it is for sure a nice-to-have type of thing.
OK, one more thing: Ketchup is not essential, nor even particularly important at all, to the making of barbecue sauce. Infinite combinations of various normal kitchen contents can be thrown together into perfectly decent barbecue sauces. That is why there are roughly nine zillion different types of barbecue sauce, ranging the globe. Probably only a very small minority of them include ketchup, or tomato paste, or tomato at all.
It just so happens to be that in my adult life, when I have been like What the hell, I will just throw together some delicious barbecue chicken on this fine afternoon, I have in nearly all cases at some point in the process dumped about a cup and a half of ketchup into a bowl. It makes a great base for a sorta half-assed Kansas City–ish barbecue sauce. Some ketchup, some blackstrap molasses, some apple cider vinegar, some sharp brown mustard, maybe a dash each of Worcestershire and Tabasco, and a little minced onion and garlic sweated in fat in a saucepan until the onion sweetens. Heat it all together for, oh, 15 minutes in that saucepan and you've got yourself a perfectly fine barbecue sauce. Not that you needed it! But it is nice to have. It is especially nice to have slathered all over some smoky chicken thigh quarters.
Ketchup is one of those grocery items that, when I buy it at the store, it is because I can't remember whether we have any at home. My household hardly ever uses ketchup for anything and I wouldn't notice if we'd run out of it. 100 percent of the time, when I buy it, I will then find that we already had at least one full bottle. 100 percent of the time, when I don't buy it because we always have two extraneous full bottles of it at home, I will then find that we somehow used it all up, despite manifestly never using it for anything. You see the problem: Only by purchasing ketchup can I ensure that we will have more than zero bottles of it, but we will always have at least one more full extraneous bottle of ketchup than the number that I purchase.
That is what happened on Saturday: I jetted down to the store for some stuff, knowing that I would be making barbecue chicken that afternoon, and didn't bother buying ketchup, figuring I would just use the ketchup in any of the half-dozen full bottles of ketchup apparently phasing in and out of being in various locations around my kitchen in response to my shopping decisions. And then of course we had none, and it was too late to go buy some (and thereby instantly cause two bottles of it to appear in my refrigerator).
I didn't think this was all that big of a problem. I had all the other stuff—molasses, mustard, vinegar, hot sauce, Worcestershire, aromatics—that would typically find its way into this type of slapdash barbecue sauce operation. I threw these together in a bowl, and it was bitter and weird and looked like a tar pit. How hard could it be to replicate the qualities of ketchup?
Tomato paste could do it. Only I didn't have any, despite always having some. Now my thinking shifted to crowdsourcing. Ketchup is tart. OK. What else is tart is vinegar. So I added more vinegar to the ketchup-less concoction in the bowl. Now it was more tart, but still not right. Ketchup is sweet. OK. What else is sweet is honey. So I added some honey. Now the barbecue sauce was more sweet, but still bland and somehow flat-tasting. Ketchup is umami-rich, due to tomatoes. What else is umami-rich is gochujang ... and I'd somehow run out of gochujang. What else is umami-rich, that I did have, is fish sauce. So I added some fish sauce. Now the barbecue sauce was watery and bad-tasting and nasty. Ketchup is salty. What else is salty is salt. So I added some salt. Now the barbecue sauce tasted like hell's dishwater.
Now I was flailing. Sriracha? Sure. A different brand of sriracha? Why not. A pinch of white sugar. A different kind of mustard. It only got worse and worse. The bowl looked like someone had liquefied a sea lion in it. A pinch of powdered cumin. Black pepper. A different kind of vinegar. A splash of dill pickle brine. In the distance, a foghorn blew. A flock of birds took flight from a tree outside, squawking in horror. At a certain point I spooned maybe half a cup of this stuff into a second bowl, so that I could stir a scoop of grape jelly into it, and on the other side of the ocean all the crucifixes in the Vatican spontaneously flipped upside-down.
I was unscrewing the lid off a jar of a third kind of mustard when I had my moment of clarity. This was not becoming barbecue sauce. This was becoming a Darren Aronofsky film. That can never be allowed. I put the mustard away and conceded defeat.
It's a little humiliating to have found myself so totally at sea in the absence of this dumb condiment! Plenty of good barbecue sauces can be made without ketchup, but this one, I think I am justified in definitively stating, cannot. At least not by me, or at any rate not by me on March 22, 2025. Relatedly, I still have a couple cups' worth of Satan's blood in a bowl on my kitchen counter if anybody is interested.
I served the chicken unsauced. It was fine. Chicken thighs need nothing but salt.
