TGI Friday's Jack Daniels dipping sauce - success!

Finally got this one close to right last night after quite a few attempts.

Best used as a moderately thin dipping or drizzling sauce on steak or chicken.  Doesn't work well as a basting sauce as the sugar will burn, although you could do a glaze right at the end on ribs or wings.

Ingredients

1/2 medium onion
2 whole heads of garlic (pick the heaviest ones you can find)
1 tablespoon tabasco or other chilli sauce
1 cup pineapple juice
3/4 cup bourbon
2 cups of brown sugar
2 beef stock cubes
4 tablespoons worcestershire sauce


Put the oven on at 200°C.  Chop a bit off the root of the whole heads of garlic so they will sit upright.  Chop about 1/4" off the top so you can see the individual cloves.  Sit these on a roasting tray with a little olive oil on top and stick them into the oven to roast.  This will take about 40-45mins, you want the top quite brown so the inner is well cooked.  Pull them out to cool when done.

Finely chop or mince the onion, or grate the thing with a microplane.

I had a lousy time finding pineapple juice on new year's eve, as the shelves had been stripped to make punch.  I ended up buying a big tin of pineapple chunks and draining them.

Do not bother using good bourbon.  Buy a $30 "cooking bottle" and drink the good stuff.

It sounds like a lot of brown sugar (and it is), but it balances the pineapple juice.


Stick everything in a saucepan.  When the garlic is down to handling temperature, just turn the whole bulb upside down and squeeze hard and all the garlic will come out easily.  If it's still hot, thermonuclear garlic will remove the skin from your fingers, you have been warned.  If you get a few shreds of garlic paper in the pot don't worry about it, pick out any large bits.

Cook down about 1/2 volume, keeping it at a low boil so you've got some decent evaporation going.  Stir occasionally but it doesn't burn with the amount of liquid in there.  Make sure all the sugar is totally dissolved.  Don't get the heat too high or it will bubble over due to the sugar content foaming.  You're probably looking at around 30 mins cooking at a low boil.

When you hit 1/2 original volume, make a thin cornflour slurry of about 1-2 teaspoons of flour and a little water.  Stir well before adding so there are no lumps.  Bring back to a low boil to cook the flour out and get a nice thin syrupy consistency.  Don't reduce too far, it's a dipping sauce.  I ended up putting about a shot more bourbon in at the end to thin mine a little and put a little punch back into the flavour.  I also gave the chilli a little top up and added a dot (like a 5c dot on a spoon) of tomato ketchup for some richness.

I didn't bother straining, most of the onion and garlic had liquefied to pulp.

Seriously yum on a charred steak off the barbie, and we're having the remainder on barbecued chicken tonight.