Carolina BBQ - How to Make a Mop Sauce

Mike Hedrick: Hey guy, Mike Hedrick; Pit Pirate Barbeque. We are still working on that award winning bbq. We went ahead and made ourselves up a nice basic rub. We made ourselves up a Carolina vinegar base finishing sauce for that pulled pork, but right now we are going to go ahead and make up a mop.

Well, a mop basically is just some moisture that we are going to go ahead and add it into the middle of the bbq cooking. As your meat gets cooked at first, you just want the rubs to be working, you are going to have the slow temperature at the end time of the heat and you are also going to get some smoke ring development into your meat. But after a little bit, the outside is going to crust up a little bit and at the point, we want to start adding moisture in to keep it absorbing and allowing the fat to come out but allowing the good flavors to go in.

To do that we are going to go ahead and use one cup of a good chicken broth, if I was doing just a beef brisket only, I probably would use a beef broth. This recipe calls for either water or the chicken broth, I like the chicken broth. We are going to use another cup of apple cider vinegar. That's going to be to added to your savory chicken broth, we are going to add a little bit of tang and to make it all stick, we are going to ahead and use oil. I am going to go ahead and use a really nice virgin olive oil, but you could use a vegetable oil or what you have around in house. I would say use sesame oil might be a little bit strong, but a little touch at that end sometimes can actually help out the bbq recipe.

We want to add in about a tablespoon and if you don't know how much a tablespoon is, measure in hand, get a tablespoon, put some salt in it and then pour it into your hand, that will save you up a lot of time in the future. That will keep you from having go, get that all the time. Put in about a tablespoon of black pepper, then not only do you want to mix that up, but you want to go ahead and run that over a medium heat and your saucepan for a little bit. We got one going earlier this morning. We've had it rolled in and you can see that it's changed from being that light color with a separated oil to be in a little darker of a color and that is what we are going to go ahead and put on our mops, on our meat as we are cooking. So, next thing we want do is going to get that pork get going and get it on there so we can go ahead and use this.