Ed Catmull

Award

The best all-around barbecue sauce

Top pick

Trader Joe’s Organic Kansas City Style BBQ Sauce

A versatile do-it-all sauce

This sauce works as a condiment and for grilling; it’s smoky with a good balance of acid and sweetness.

The Trader Joe’s Organic Kansas City Style BBQ Sauce is a smoky sauce that did well in our taste tests and even better on the grill. We asked for a sauce that could do it all, and we got it. It’s a pantry whiz, able to spruce up chicken, pulled pork, or even the humble chicken nugget.

Thick and pulpy, this jack-of-all-trades has enough body to coat a fry but is still loose enough to brush onto meat. It’s tomato-forward and slightly sweet, with enough smoke to be pleasant without blowing out your palate. When basted on a chicken thigh and grilled during our testing, the hickory smoke flavor bloomed, and the caramelized sugars made the flavors of the sauce more complex.

Unlike some of the more cloying sauces we tasted, which were loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetness in the Trader Joe’s sauce, which comes from a mix of organic cane sugar