Fig Jam Is the Secret to This Effortless BBQ Sauce

By Ali Francis

There's a low-key cool factor to acclaimed chef Tanya Holland's homemade barbecue sauce: It's sweet, spicy, and a little smoky. The food equivalent of a thick swipe of eyeliner in broad daylight, or dark velour pants at the office.

The cookbook author and chair of the James Beard Foundation Awards—known for Brown Sugar Kitchen, her now-closed Californian soul food restaurant, and her stint competing on Top Chef—developed this fig-jam barbecue sauce for Bon Appétit's June 2023 issue. Making a big batch is worth the effort, though, lucky for us, it requires very little. Plus, once you’ve bought the ingredients for Holland's riff, you’ll be rich in barbecue-y goodness all summer long.

While there are nearly as many barbecue sauce variations in the US as there are people who love them, most originated along the Eastern coastline between North Carolina and the Florida panhandle. The Arawak—Indigenous people living in the Caribbean and Florida around the time of Spanish colonization—would slow-cook meat over wood grills. Then enslaved people adapted those techniques, dressing grilled and smoked meats with early versions of the barbecue sauces we see today.

Holland's sauce is a bit of a mash-up: "It's on the thicker side, which you usually find more in Western US states," she says. But the real influence was her Louisiana-based grandmother's singular fig jam, made from homegrown fruit that was "sweet as candy," says Holland. A store-bought jar of the preserve is the chef's secret weapon, deploying heft and floral sweetness all at once. The end result tastes like a labor of love, but it comes together in under 20 minutes.

Fig jam is simmered on the stove with apple cider vinegar, spicy brown mustard, Worcestershire sauce, chipotle peppers in adobo, chopped onion and garlic, and brown sugar. The mixture bubbles and caramelizes into a dark glaze on the stove, scenting your kitchen with syrupy fruit and vinegary mustard. After it's whizzed until slick and velvety with an immersion blender, you’ll be tempted to dunk crispy french fries in it until it's all gone.

If you want to do that, great. If not, that's great too: Holland advises lacquering baby back pork ribs in barbecue sauce as they’re grilling—"it i​​ntensifies the flavor of the fig"—and the same technique can be applied to just about any meat you’ve got on deck, from chicken thighs to to skirt steak. If you’re a veg-head like me, this sauce supercharges smashed and seared mushrooms; the thick glaze sticks effortlessly to the crispy, frizzled edges. Maple-soy tofu is also ready and willing to moonlight as barbecue tofu.

"I love the combination of sweet and heat," says Holland. "Plus, it's unique and was a big hit at my latest gathering."