A Splash Of This Soda Brand Turns Your BBQ Sauce Up Several Notches

If you're anything like me, you absolutely love experimenting with new styles of sauce to enjoy alongside your favorite dishes and snacks. With this in mind, although our favorite store-bought BBQ sauce is a vinegar-based variant from North Carolina, when it comes to homemade BBQ sauce there's one ingredient that puts it on an entirely new level. Adding Dr Pepper is an underrated strategy that pays dividends if it's executed correctly.

You might worry soda will overpower everything else, but Dr Pepper adds its unique flavors (23 of them, to be exact) to BBQ sauce without taking over completely. Many recommend replacing some or all of the water in your BBQ sauce recipe with Dr Pepper; simmering the sauce in a saucepan to ensure the final product isn't overly thin. You can also add Dr Pepper to store-bought BBQ sauce and simmer them together on the stove to give it a worthwhile upgrade, although this obviously takes away a fair amount of control over what the finished product will taste like.

A great sauce is only as good as the food you pair with it, and luckily a BBQ sauce with Dr Pepper in it blends remarkably well with numerous different foods. Starting things off with a legendary dish in the world of BBQ, Dr Pepper BBQ sauce is incredible alongside pulled pork, with some even opting to cook the pulled pork itself in Dr Pepper to give it a boost in flavor. Unsurprisingly, this means that coating pulled pork in a Dr Pepper BBQ sauce is likewise a great move, and is arguably the best way to test out the unique ingredient.

Beyond that, you'll want to look toward dishes that benefit from a sauce with a sweeter profile rather than ones you'd prefer to enjoy with a tangy or spicy sauce. Smoked turkey is another meat that's absolutely perfect for a sweet Dr Pepper BBQ sauce, as it can easily liven up the bird's mild flavor and provide it with some much-needed moisture; making it an incredibly tasty dish. If you're looking for a simple, versatile meat to pinpoint the impact Dr Pepper has on BBQ sauce, you can't go wrong with dousing some chicken wings in your exciting new concoction and seeing how you feel about its flavor.