In my first corporate job after college, I worked at a company that had lunch catered in for their employees every Friday. It was my job to plan and coordinate the whole thing each week. There were definitely office favorites, but there was no place that got requested more than Chik-Fil-A.
So I had Chik-Fil-A on a regular rotation, and it usually went off without a hitch. Until one week when, instead of bringing the usual, bountiful array of their full catalog of sauces — they only brought Polynesian sauce.
People lost their damn minds. You’d of thought I presented a school full of toddlers with sandwiches that were cut into rectangles instead of triangles. But I have it on good authority that these people were business professionals in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. They had college degrees! They wore business suits and drank fancy coffee! They were responsible for negotiating deals in the tens of thousands of dollars!
And yet, sauce broke them.
I don’t bring up this story to subtly shame the people who came by my desk asking me if I could call up Chik-Fil-A and have them come back and bring different sauce options — that’s just a bonus. I bring this up to prove a point: Sauce is important.
People love their condiments almost as much as Reddit loves GameStop. And there’s no cuisine — outside of Chik-Fil-A, which I’d argue is a cult cuisine in and of itself — that has opinions about sauce more than barbecue.
Every barbecue region worth their salt lick has a sauce. In Alabama, it’s white sauce. In North Carolina, it’s a vinegar sauce. Kansas City has its signature sweet/tangy sauce. Texas has its mop sauce. And South Carolina — the state whose sandwich we tackled this week — it’s gold sauce FTW.
Gold Sauce is a tangy, mustard-based bbq sauce. It has a lot of mustard, a little vinegar, a little honey, and some spice. We found a few different recipes which were all slight variations of the same thing. So we chose the one with the tangy/sweet/spicy proportions were closest to our sensibilities. What does it taste like? Honestly, when it was all mixed together, it reminded us of…Chik-Fil-A sauce.
Don’t @ me South Carolinians, that’s what it tasted like.
We’re not psychopaths, so we don’t eat sandwiches that are just bread and sauce. Clearly the gold sauce needed a meat vessel. And once again, that meant pulled pork. I don’t know if this is because the Carolina’s need a direct comparison to each other or if the eastern seaboard’s portfolio is heavily invested in Big Pig. But, we didn’t make the list. We’re just eating our way through it. So, pulled pork it is!
To mimic the flavors in the gold sauce, we used a rub that consisted of ground mustard, salt, brown sugar, pepper, paprika and cayenne and coated it all over the pork butt. Still unable to access a legit barbecue to slow-smoke that piggy bottom on the grill, we once again pulled out the crockpot to make this sandwich happen.
Don’t @ me, pitmasters. We did all we could do.
For what we lacked in actual “barbecue” we made up for in spades with “our house smells amaaaaazing” which I attribute partially to the pork and partially to the liquid smoke we used to approximate the taste of having been made in a legit smoker.
A mere 7-ish hours later, the pork was pulled and ready to eat. We tossed it with a little bit of the gold sauce and globbed a little more on top. Because sauce.
The pork was fantastic and moist in its own right and didn’t need the gold sauce to be tasty sandwich fodder. And the gold sauce was quite good. The mustardiness of it all was well suited to pork. If I could change anything about this sandwich, I’d pick a different bun. The buns we got from Trader Joe’s were a little dry and, dare I say, to bready?
Yes (this time with more conviction for the people in the back) the bread was too bready.
Now the ten million dollar question: if I had to choose between the North and South Carolina iteration of the pulled pork sandwich, which one would I choose????
Like I said at the top, sauce is important. So it’s no surprise that this opinion all comes down to the sauce, so I’ve got to tip it over to North Carolina. The sauce was a little more zingy, a little more zesty while still feeling a little lighter on the meat. I’d definitely eat a pork sandwich with gold sauce again, but much like Chik-Fil-A sauce, it’s not going to be the condiment I reach for if I have options in front of me.
Also, I’m not eating at Chik-Fil-A. Who has time to wait in those lines? Y’all need more hobbies in your life.
I know I said don’t @ me, but go ahead. @ me.
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