The Best Homemade BBQ Sauce

My good friend Criggybarbar over at www.criggybites.com has come across this fantastic BBQ sauce recipe and I guarantee that once you have made it shop bought sauce will never cut the mustard again. Criggy sourced the sauce from the book "Hog" by Richard H Turner and Richard states the recipe should keep on evolving so I made a few changes myself (purely because I couldn't get all the ingredients). I also halved the measures as I didn't want to make so much this time, my quantities below make 750ml. Give it a go, I dare you, you won't regret it.

Ingredients:

For the spice mix:
1tsp Fennel seeds
1tsp Cumin seeds
1tsp Coriander seeds
1tsp Celery seeds
1tsp Black peppercorns.


For the sauce:
1x White onions, grated
2x Garlic cloves, grated
25ml Veg oil
125ml Apple juice
125ml Malt vinegar (Criggy uses cider vinegar but I had a vat of malt to use up)
1x Apple, cored, peeled and grated
25g Smoked Maldon sea salt flakes
50g Chipotle paste (Waitrose do it here)
125ml Maple syrup
125ml French's American mustard
210g Pomegranate molasses (also from Waitrose)
125g Apricot jam
1/2 Can chopped tomatoes


Method:

1. For the spice mix put all the ingredients in to a large dry saucepan and toast until you can smell the lovely pungent flavours.
2. Add the onions, garlic and oil to the toasted spices and cook on medium heat for 10 minutes or more until the onions are really soft. Add the apple juice and vinegar and simmer until reduced by a third. (Criggy uses a chopstick like a dipstick to gauge the amount of reduction). Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a simmer for 10 minutes.
3. Blitz the sauce in a blender, then pass through a fine sieve and funnel into sterilised  jars.