What happened? Scientifically speaking...

11 years ago

last modified: 11 years ago

Well, I'm hoping there may be someone here to give an explanation of what happened to my homemade BBQ sauce tonight.

My ingredients: canned tomato sauce, liquid hickory smoke, mustard (bottled), Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, chili powders, S&P, fresh garlic & powder, cinnamon, honey, dash of stevia powder, and a pat of butter. I also added in some baking soda along the way to reduce the acid.

I added them all together and slowly simmered, adding pinches of the soda a few times during the process. It started out red and then slowly started turning darker. An hour or so later I end up with this amazingly brown/mahogany colored sauce! In the past it has been much redder.

So what happened? I've got a theory it was the soda that turned it. Perhaps the sugars in the sauce turned color?

Appreciate any ideas/answers!
CMK

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Comments (10)

rob333 (zone 7b)
11 years ago
What was the pan made of that you simmered this in?

reactive metals
dcarch7 d c f l a s h 7 @ y a h o o . c o m
11 years ago
With Worcestershire sauce & soy sauce, it seems very normal color to me. I would be surprised if it comes out redder.

dcarch
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christinmk z5b eastern WA
Original Author
11 years ago
-rob, just a regular stainless steel pot.

-dcarch, so you think just a splash of the two would cause the color?? It was still bright red after I first added them to the tomato sauce. Do you think they built up color as it simmered?

CMK
sushipup1
11 years ago
You said that in the past, the sauce has been redder.... So you used the same recipe in the past? What exactly was changed this time? Same ingredients plus same process should yield same results, that's why we call them recipes. But any changes you make will alter your end result.
carolb_w_fl_coastal_9/10
11 years ago
last modified: 11 years ago
I can think of a lot of things that would darken if I simmered them for an hour or more...
donna_loomis
11 years ago
If you had added nothing to the tomato sauce, it would still turn brown after simmering for a long time. I think Carol got it right.
plllog
11 years ago
I thought this was an intriguing question. It's not the soda. I think the extent of the brownness comes from all the brown things, as Dcarch said, but there's also the thing where tomato sauces go from a bright red to a dark one after simmering a long time as Carol and Donna said. I couldn't find anything easily online that said why, however. Some talked about the sugars in the tomato caramelizing, but those sounded like guesses rather than authoritative.

I've read things about interactions with the pan, too, as Rob alluded to, but I've had barbecue sauce go brownish in enamel. A much redder brown, but I didn't have all the brown ingredients you do (W sauce, soy sauce, honey, smoke). From a painter's point of view, those ingredients cooked enough to really combine with the tomatoes add up to the nutty brown in the picture.

Did you simmer longer than you did before?
christinmk z5b eastern WA
Original Author
11 years ago
Thanks to all that commented.

It isn't a recipe set in stone...I alter according to how much I am cooking. But all the ingredients remained approximately the same except for the baking soda, which I added a lot more of this time (hence my question of whether the SS, W sauce, etc would be enough to turn it darker since they didn't before. It very well could be the fact I simmered them all a bit longer (thought not by too much).

-plllog, thanks for looking around online for me. ;-)
CMK
arlinek
11 years ago
Certainly cooking for a longer period of time and reducing it further will darken the sauce. I also wonder about the Stevia (I never use artificial anything as I taste the difference). And as an aside: if you're just adding a "dash" of Stevia, why wouldn't you just use nat'l sugar instead? Certainly the calories couldn't be the issue when making a decent size portion of sauce.
christinmk z5b eastern WA
Original Author
11 years ago
Stevia hasn't added color to anything I have used prior. Due to health reasons I refrain from eating sugar as much as possible...only thing I have on hand for sweetening is stevia and honey.

CMK

What happened? Scientifically speaking...

Comments (10)

rob333 (zone 7b)

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What happened? Scientifically speaking...

Comments (10)

rob333 (zone 7b)

dcarch7 d c f l a s h 7 @ y a h o o . c o m

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christinmk z5b eastern WAOriginal Author

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