Give Your Baby Back Ribs Better Flavor With A Splash Of This Canned Ingredient In Your BBQ Sauce

There's great news for anyone who has a favorite three-ingredient barbecue sauce. For one, you have an uber-easy way to coat all your marvelous meats without having to sort through each of the prepackaged barbecue sauces at the grocery store. Even better, that simple recipe leaves tons of room for all kinds of fun additional flavors. The pineapple juice you might otherwise tip into your piña colada is also a terrific addition to your next barbecue sauce adaptation.

Although a fruity pineapple juice-enhanced barbecue sauce creates a novel balance for all manner of salty, savory meats, it's particularly lovely with oven-baked baby back ribs. Pork and pineapple are already a classic match, famously seen in dishes such as tacos al pastor, tocino, and, of course, sweet and sour pork. That baby backs typically taste a little sweeter than swine's larger spare ribs also makes the pineapple juice's sugar really pop on the more petite rack. You can add it to your usual sauce with little more effort than it takes to crack open a can.

Should you have a preferred store-bought barbecue sauce, give it the pineapple juice treatment by adding 2 tablespoons of juice per 1 cup of sauce. You can increase to taste, but stop before it becomes too thin. Once you introduce enough liquid to turn your barbecue sauce into more of a glaze, it won't cling as densely to the ribs. Skip the pineapple juice if your ready-made fave is already on the sweeter side; it creates a more candied effect than most folks are after in this case.

Similar principles apply to homemade pineapple juice-enhanced barbecue sauce. If your go-to recipe already calls for brown sugar and/or molasses (many do), consider cutting those sweeteners by at least half when introducing pineapple juice. If your proportions are based on a fairly standard 1 cup of ketchup as the base, ½ cup of pineapple juice should net a familiar, desired consistency when it's finished. Also, add the pineapple juice at the beginning to simmer with the other ingredients so everything can fully coalesce. You can then use your pineapple juice-enhanced barbecue sauce to cloak your ribs how you normally would.