Chipotle Peppers Are The Easiest Way To Give Barbecue A Spicy Kick

The onset of summer means it's officially barbecue season, and there's no better smell than stepping outside to the familiar scent of the neighborhood grills hard at work. Part of crafting the perfect barbecue is making your own homemade sauce, but when you're spending hours perfecting the meat, it's not always easy to create a barbecue sauce from scratch.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to jazz up a store-bought sauce — it all comes down to knowing the best flavor combinations. If you want to add some spice to that bottle of barbecue sauce, look no further than chipotle peppers. The smoky heat blends perfectly with the sauce's natural tangy sweetness, leaving you with a sweet and spicy blend that you'll want to put on everything — not just that rack of ribs. Chipotles can be quite hot, so be sure to start with a small amount and increase as needed.

If you prefer spicy food, you'll wonder what took you so long to add chipotle peppers to your backyard barbecue. A chipotle pepper is actually just a jalapeño that was processed a bit differently. Whereas jalapeños are picked from the vine and served, chipotles are jalapeños that hang around on the vine until they blush. From there, they're dried out and smoked, giving them that distinct flavor but keeping them extra hot. The peppers are often canned in adobo sauce, which blends vinegar with ingredients like tomatoes, garlic, and sugar to enhance their flavor.

Since ribs, brisket, and other types of barbecue are often smoked, the chipotle peppers' heat blends right in with the barbecued meat's smokiness. These peppers can rank anywhere from 2,500 Scoville units all the way up to 10,000, so make sure to add the peppers into the sauce in small quantities at first so that it doesn't become too hot to handle.

Brown sugar is an essential element to a good barbecue sauce, and balancing that combination of sweet and spicy is the ultimate goal when adding chipotles to the recipe. Since sugar will naturally help mitigate too much spice, if you find that you did add more chipotles than were necessary, try adding a bit of brown sugar and taste testing once more. If you don't have any brown sugar, honey might work as well. Follow the same process of adding it in small quantities, then taste testing. Molasses is yet another alternative.

If you can't find chipotle peppers, you can use traditional green jalapeños and make your own chipotles at home. Just know that they'll take longer to smoke, but you can do so by cooking them low and slow in a smoker at about 200 degrees; depending on the size and ripeness of the jalapeños, the process could take up to 24 hours.