"Taste of the South" Simmers with Ingredients from the Southwest!

By Julie Murphree, Arizona Farm Bureau: I was recently sent a bottle of OKB (Old Kentucky Barbeque Sauce) to sample for Fill Your Plate. I love when I’m sent a test sample! When it comes to barbeque sauce, I definitely will sample.  

Despite one of OKB’s customers saying, “This is the greatest sauce I have ever tasted,” I wanted to sample it for myself. I cooked a pork roast for the sampling and concluded I love OKB.  

They have a great family story to their secret sauce that by the way, uses Arizona-grown ingredients. Nearly 100 hundred years ago, during the time of Al Capone and Elliot Ness, two brothers, Clarence and Mike were businessmen working along the deltas of the Ohio River Basin. Clarence owned a dairy and Mike ran bootleg. Living and working in the river bottoms, they delivered their wares into the hills and hollers of northern Kentucky to a grateful citizenry. Eventually they merged their transportation efforts. Clarence' milk wagons would make their normal daily runs and drop off a quart of milk and a quart of hooch on each doorstep, keep the tally and collect from the customers each week.  

To read the rest of this fun and entertaining story, you’ve got to go to the OKB website. Americans love their barbecue!

But with all the countless barbecue sauces available in the market, it can be intimidating to find the best one. OKB can be ranked right up there at the top. This 175-year-old recipe concocted in the hills and hollers of Western Kentucky has definitely stood the test of time. The experts would contend that it’s in the Carolina style of BBQ sauces; a vinegar based sauce with eight spices. Just the way I like it. It’s calmly sweet with a yummy vinegar bite and passes over the pallet with a distinctive flavor. Personally, I don’t like a BBQ sauce that’s too sweet; I trend toward tart.  

The OKB is more than a sauce for meats. It is a great dipping sauce for fresh vegetables, great on all types of potatoes and makes a wonderful additive to Bloody Mary’s. I plan to try it with other things. My OKB bottle is in the refrigerator and I’ve now tried it on two pork roast and even some homemade pinto beans. Yum! The OKB is now exclusively produced, bottled and marketed within Arizona.

To obtain your own bottle, you can now purchase OKB at The Power Road Farmers’ Market at 4011 S. Power Road in Mesa and the new Hilton Village Farmer’s Market each week. You can also order directly on the OKB website (http://okbsauce.com/).