The Salt Lick Barbecue Sauce.

The Salt Lick Barbecue Sauce is the one ingredient we use from start to finish with our food. We use it before we start to cook meats, we use it to baste while we’re cooking, and we serve it at every table as the perfect condiment for your meal. We even included it in a few of our side dishes as well.

Long before we started to bottle and sell it, people would stop by the restaurant and request a to-go sampler of it. Now we sell it at the restaurant, in stores, and online. I’ve had people tell me that when they can’t get Salt Lick barbecue, they’ll at least use their home stash of our sauce to doctor up barbecue from somewhere else. We use a vinegar-based sauce rather than a tomato-based sauce, which would burn and add an acrid taste to the barbecue.

Ours is essentially a Southeastern style of sauce that has been Texa-fied with a list of ingredients – cayenne and chili powder, to name a few. When the roots of this sauce left the Carolinas with my relatives in the 1870s, I am sure it had no cayenne pepper in it. But over the years it has taken on more of the terroir from which it is served.

Excerpt from The Salt Lick Cookbook, A Story of Land, Family, and Love. By Scott Roberts and Jessica Dupuy