a sauceAlabama white sauce
also: white barbecue sauce · white sauce
A tub of it goes on the table in north Alabama the way a red sauce does everywhere else.
A mayonnaise-based barbecue sauce, thin, pale and sharp. Typical ingredients are vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper and horseradish stirred into mayonnaise. It goes on barbecue chicken, which is an Alabama speciality, and on wings — dunked whole rather than brushed.
The story Cited · wp-barbecue-in-alabama
White sauce was invented in Decatur, Alabama in 1925. It is believed to have been made by Bob Gibson at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q there.
Alabama barbecue centres on pork cooked in open pits over hickory, with oak and pecan also used. A vinegar-based sauce like North Carolina's is common in the north of the state; a tomato-based one is usual south of Birmingham. White sauce stayed a north Alabama thing until 1994, when it began to be bottled and sold commercially.
Barbecue became popular in Alabama in the early 19th century, with roots in Native American cooking. Local militias held barbecues to get members to turn up for yearly drills, and they served as political and civic gatherings; by the late 1820s some social reformers opposed them, arguing they encouraged "political debasement" or that the alcohol and merrymaking were a moral problem. They failed. The first barbecue restaurants opened in the 1890s; the oldest continuously operating one in the state is Golden Rule Bar-B-Q, founded in 1891. In 2015 the Alabama Department of Tourism ran "The Year of Alabama Barbecue".
How it is done Tradition
Dunk, do not brush. A whole smoked or fried chicken goes into the tub and comes out coated; wings go in by the basket. Mayonnaise splits over direct heat, so the sauce meets the bird after the fire, not during. It doubles as a dressing for the slaw beside it.
Today Harvested · fdc-saws-alabama-white-sauce
Bottled since 1994 and now sold nationally by several Alabama makers. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for Saw's Alabama White Sauce reads 300 mg sodium, 1 g sugar and 17 g fat in a 2-tablespoon serving — 150 mg and 0.5 g in one tablespoon, with soybean oil first and two vinegars on the list. Big Bob Gibson's own bottle returns no record in FoodData Central, so its panel is not on this disk. Nobody publishes a Scoville number.
The particulars
| base | dairy |
|---|---|
| heat | mild |
| region | The American South, The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · In-Between Sportwear, Inc. (Saw's) · Birmingham, AL |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | — |
| vinegar | #3 on the label |
| butter or oil | #1 on the label |
| tomato | — |
| sugar | #5 on the label |
| soy sauce | — |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 150 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 0.5 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | refined soybean oil, water, distilled vinegar, salted egg yolk, sugar, apple cider vinegar, spices, eggs, salt, onion powder, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, xanthan gum, paprika, garlic powder, natural flavor, EDTA disodium |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. Saw's Alabama White Sauce, 12 fl oz. Label serving is 2 Tbsp (28 g); sodium 300 mg and sugars 1 g per serving, so 150 mg and 0.5 g per tablespoon. This is a Birmingham bottle, not Decatur's: Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, which the invention is credited to, returns no record in FoodData Central, so its panel is not on this disk. pepper_rank is 0 because no chile is named on the label — only 'spices' at 7 and paprika at 14, and the cayenne and horseradish that descriptions of the sauce name do not appear on this one. The brand owner name is as the USDA record carries it. No Scoville number is published. Every bottle we have read is on the sauce page.
Recipes you can use
Old cookbooks are printed whole, spelling and all. Where a recipe is still somebody's copyright, you get the ingredient list and a link to the rest.
Barbecued squirrels
- four tablespoonfuls of vinegar
- two tablespoonfuls of butter
- a teaspoonful, each, of sugar and made mustard
- a half teaspoonful, each, of salt and pepper
Copied verbatim, old spellings kept. Not white sauce — no mayonnaise, and squirrels rather than chicken — but the same manoeuvre: a sharp fat-and-vinegar sauce poured over meat after the fire, and left to sit ten minutes.
Not to be confused with
- Ranch dressing — Sharpness and use. White sauce is vinegar-and-horseradish thin and gets dunked in; ranch is herb-and-buttermilk and sits in a cup.
Who it runs with
Where we got it
- Barbecue in Alabama · link
- Saw's Alabama White Sauce — branded food label (FDC ID 1955770) · link
- Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping — Marion Harland, 1906 · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.