Why Salt Lick sauce is so good

I just wrote about my new favorite BBQ sauce, the original recipe from The Salt Lick, outside of Austin, TX. Now I know why. As I was perusing the label to look at the ingredients (oil, vinegar, prepared mustard, Worcestershire, spices, etc) I noticed the nutrition info.

Egad.

Take a look at whatever sauce you keep handy near your computer. (Don't tell me you don't have sauce at your desk at work.) You'll see that per 2 Tbsp serving it has something like 25 calories and no grams of fat. Well, the folks at the Salt Lick seem to have adopted the "Fat, it's where the flavor is" theory of cooking: their original recipe sauce has 160 calories and 16 grams of fat per two Tbsp serving. Which basically means it is BBQ sauce flavored salad dressing.

Now, God didn't design BBQ to be healthy, but do we really need to put a fat-based sauce all over our fat-based meat? That said, if there is that much oil in the sauce, I wonder if I can deep fry a turkey in it. Hmm.

3 bullets on food

Some random stuff before I head off to New York:

• I think I've found the best barbeque sauce in the world. My mom's family comes from the part of South Carolina that uses mustard as the base for their BBQ sauce, and I'm partial to Mathews (which I think is from Saluda). I never thought that it would be replaced in my sauce hierarchy by a sauce from Texas, but it has. I'll be the first to say that Texans get a lot wrong about BBQ, including the feature animal (cow) and sauce base (tomato), but the folks at The Salt Lick in Austin are on to something great: a mustard based sauce with good tang, a touch of sweetness, and just the right amount of vinegar. I've been told their BBQ is also good, and if it's half as good as the sauce it's worth your trouble to acquire some.
• Many moons ago I complained about the lack of decent yogurt around here. Well, my favorite market started selling Stonyfield, which is great. What's weird is that I've been eating a lot of the caramel yogurt. It seems pretty strange to have "caramel" on the bottom as opposed to "peaches" on the bottom.
  
• Cheeks are hot. Huan experimented with halibut cheeks several times, and they were fantastic. Then on New Year's Eve I had a pasta dish with pork jowl. Now the New York Times just ran a story about to towns in Italy that have competing versions of a dish based on, you guessed it pork jowl. And it turns out that one of the few places you can get cured, unsmoked pork jowl in America is in Seattle. I'll let you know how it goes.