Cooking Sauce or Flavor Enhancer 2009

Outstanding Cooking Sauce or Flavor Enhancer 2009: Appledore Cove Seaside Barbecue Sauce

When you think of barbecue, you don’t necessarily think of Maine, but last year two business partners and good friends from North Berwick, Tom Gorski and Jeffrey Garstka, founders of Appledore Cove, decided to make a barbecue sauce that would rival anything below the Mason Dixon line. As with all products sold by Appledore Cove—the seven-year old company also makes salsas, condiments, dips, marinades, preserves and other sauces—its Seaside Barbecue sauce started with a small batch made by hand. “We have a 40-gallon kettle and all of our products start in there. Nobody can reinvent a new sauce, so everybody looks at the ingredients and asks, ‘What if I add this, this and that?’” explains Gorski. “We dumped some Smuttynose Brown Ale [brewed locally] in there and instead of using white sugar, we thought, let’s use brown sugar and honey. We wanted to make it clean.”

They kept at it until they had a product they thought was “awesome,” says Gorski, and then they took their small batch out to local farmers’ markets to see if other tasters agreed. “It’s flavorful but it’s not sticky, gooey or too sauced out,” says Garstka. “We don’t use molasses or corn syrup. And we process our own ingredients—we buy [locally grown] onions and garlic whole and chop them up ourselves and we are careful not to overcook them. Other places use dehydrated onions or garlic.” All of these small details add up to a noticeable difference in their clean-tasting sauce. Suggested retail price: $5.99-$6.99/10.5-ounce. appledorecove.com.–D. Moss