As those who joined us for our first ever barbecue and grilling class on Saturday learned, one of the easiest ways to really personalize your cookout is to create your own custom sauce. 

And while you may want to start from scratch, spend all day simmering, softening, sweeting, and so on, we prefer to take a store bought classic such as Cattlemens and "doctorfy" it.

Take two bottles of your favorite sauce, add to it roughly 8 ounces of fruit jam or preserves (for our demonstration we used apricot preserves), approximately 1/4 cup cherry juice or other fruit juice and a 1/4 teaspoon smoked chipotle powder.  Blend over medium low heat and let simmer for 20-30 minutes. 

Again, the recipe above is only one of a million plus variations you can create and call your own.  Different jams and jellies, different spices, adding butter, adding apple cider vinegar, adding molasses, adding honey or maple syrup, and so forth. 

And that's to Cattlemen's for providing the entire class with bottles of their various sauces including Gold, Smokehouse, Sweet, Honey, and Classic!

- SmokeInDaEye.com, Home of Bigger, Badder, Bolder BBQ