Sonic Groovy Sauce

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Groovy Sauce is a mayonnaise base with barbecue sauce, a little mustard and some sweetness. Four ingredients, and three of them behave predictably.

The barbecue sauce does not. Bottled barbecue sauces vary enormously — some are smoke-forward, some are vinegar-forward, some are essentially spiced ketchup, and some are so sweet they are closer to a glaze.

Whichever you use will dominate. That is worth knowing before you blame the recipe.

What to look for

A sweet, tomato-based sauce with mild smoke. Kansas City style is the right family — thick, sweet, tomatoey.

Avoid vinegar-forward Carolina styles, which will make the sauce sharp and thin.

Avoid heavily smoked sauces. The smoke concentrates against the neutral mayonnaise and takes over.

Avoid mustard-based South Carolina sauces, which collide with the mustard already in the recipe.

If your finished sauce tastes wrong and you cannot say why, change the barbecue sauce before changing anything else.

The ratio

Roughly three parts mayonnaise to one part barbecue sauce. Mayonnaise is the base; barbecue sauce is a seasoning within it.

Push it towards half and half and you have made a thin, sweet, orange sauce that tastes like barbecue sauce someone put mayonnaise in.

The colour tells you

Pale tan or light peach. If it is brown or orange, there is too much barbecue sauce.

Same trick as with fry sauce and burger sauce, and it works because people consistently over-pour the coloured ingredient.

The hour in the fridge

The mustard powder and the onion and garlic powders all need to hydrate. The smoke and molasses from the barbecue sauce need to spread through the fat.

Fresh, it tastes like two condiments in a bowl. Rested, it is one sauce.

What you need

• 180 ml mayonnaise
• 60 ml sweet tomato-based barbecue sauce
• 1 tbsp yellow mustard
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp cider vinegar
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/4 tsp black pepper
• a pinch of cayenne

Method

1. 1. Whisk everything together until evenly coloured.
2. 2. Refrigerate at least 1 hour.
3. 3. Taste and adjust. If it is too sweet, vinegar; too sharp, honey.

Yellow mustard, not Dijon

Yellow mustard brings vinegar sharpness and turmeric colour without heat. Dijon brings pungency that fights the barbecue sauce's sweetness rather than balancing it.

Adjusting for a sweet barbecue sauce

If your bottle is on the sweet side, drop the honey entirely and add an extra teaspoon of vinegar. The recipe assumes a moderately sweet sauce and many supermarket ones are sweeter than that.

Taste after mixing, before it goes in the fridge, and adjust then — it is much harder to judge once it is cold.

Storing

A week in the fridge in a sealed jar. It thickens slightly on the first day.

Do not freeze. Mayonnaise splits.