This Tangy Salad Dressing Works Shockingly Well As A BBQ Sauce

There are moments when you may want a Carolina pulled pork BBQ sandwich, or you're prepping chicken for the grill and there's no sauce to be found in the house. Well, if you have a bottle of French dressing, you might find it to be the perfect stand-in for barbecue sauce you never knew you needed. It may sound a little unconventional, and it definitely will raise eyebrows from those who are barbecue purists, but it might also turn into your go-to sauce the next time you're looking to spice up a weeknight meal.

Much like a Carolina barbecue sauce, French dressing has a tomato and vinegar base that is amped up with a mixture of ingredients that hit all of your taste sensations. It's sweet, sour, and sometimes spicy depending on the ingredients used to craft it. Together with the ketchup and vinegar, French dressing uses sugar, oil, and paprika. 

From there, you can put your creative mark on it with your favorite umami additions, aromatics, herbs, and spices. Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and mustard are among the most common ingredients added to French dressing that will also make for a perfect barbecue sauce. To really give it that barbecue flavor, add some chili powder and sweet brown sugar, and no one will be the wiser that it started off as a salad dressing.  

The beauty of this French dressing barbecue hack is that, just like the best barbecue marinades, you get to play with its taste to produce a different end game than when you are making it to drizzle it over salad greens. You can amp up the flavor with a few simple additions you probably have in your pantry. Worcestershire sauce, molasses, honey, soy sauce, and brown sugar are easy to add to this base dressing and will leave you with a sauce that is thick and ready to use just like you would any other barbecue sauce.

French dressing is oil-based, so if you plan to use it straight out of the bottle without any additions, don't expect it to produce the same type of caramelization that a typical barbecue sauce does. If you are using it as a dipping sauce or to brush on at the end of the grilling process, French dressing will work well; however, things like ribs crave caramelization from sweet ingredients, like molasses and honey. 

For this reason, if you are going to go into the bold unknown and use French dressing as a substitute, stick to foods like BBQ mini Chicken sliders or those recipes that don't require a low and slow cook. French dressing also will not thicken in a slow cooker, which is designed to trap moisture, and instead, it can leave you with an oily and watery sauce. So, it's best to avoid pulled pork and other slow-cook recipes and stick to regular barbecue sauce instead.