Give barbecue sauce a summer upgrade with addition of fresh blueberries
Blueberries give this lip-smacking barbecue sauce multiple levels of fresh appeal. One hits you at first glance upon seeing its unexpected indigo color. Another — its flavor — is fresher than a traditional sauce, with the fruit lending its gentle, nuanced sweetness to the tangy-savory mix. That sweetness is backed up by a drizzle of molasses, so this sauce has none of the highly refined sugar that tops the ingredient list of most bottled barbecue sauces, nor the artificial additives.
Adding to its health appeal, the sauce also has less salt and more nutrients than its counterparts. With those selling points, the bounty of fresh berries at the market now (though frozen would work, too), and the fact that this luscious sauce is so simple and quick to make, why wouldn't you?
Just simmer the ingredients until the berries are warm and bursting — less than 10 minutes — then puree. The accompanying recipe makes two batches worth, so you can serve a crowd, or keep any remaining sauce in the refrigerator for four days, or freeze it for several months. Here, the sauce is brushed onto chicken thighs toward the end of grilling and chars pleasantly on the meat without burning. Doing that gives the poultry a purple-ish hue, which doesn't bother me, but if you would rather avoid that and get more of a color contrast between the sauce and the chicken, brush it with a little honey at that point instead, and serve the sauce alongside. Either way, you get the complete, fresh effect.