a sauceHoney barbecue sauce
also: honey BBQ · honey barbeque
The order a table puts in for the person who does not want heat, and the one children get.
A thick sweet red sauce: corn syrup or sugar, vinegar, tomato, honey, smoke flavour and spices. Sticky enough to hold on a wing without butter, sweet enough to caramelise under a broiler or on a grill. Every wing chain sells one, and it is usually the mildest thing on the board.
The story Cited · wp-buffalo-wing
Barbecue sauce reached the wing through the pizza chains. Domino's added Buffalo wings to its national menu in 1994 after four Super Bowl appearances by the Buffalo Bills, and Pizza Hut followed the next year. As the market grew, restaurants built out sauces beyond Buffalo — some drawing on Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Caribbean and Indian cooking, some inventing combinations like Blueberry BBQ Wing Sauce or Maple/Bacon Glaze to hold customers' interest.
Inference — honey barbecue is the sauce that made a wing board possible. Once a menu had a second sauce it needed a sweet one, and every sauce added after that had somewhere to sit.
The sweet-and-sour tomato condiment behind it is much older than the wing: American home cookbooks were bottling a spiced 'chili sauce' of tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, onions and red peppers well before 1930.
How it is done Tradition
Warm it — cold barbecue sauce slides off. Toss the fried wings in it, or brush it on a smoked or grilled wing in the last few minutes so the sugar sets without burning. It will burn: the sugar in it catches long before the skin is done, which is why it goes on at the end and never at the start.
Today Harvested · fdc-sweet-baby-rays-honey-bbq
On every wing board in America. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for Sweet Baby Ray's Honey Barbecue Sauce reads 300 mg sodium and 15 g sugar in a 2-tablespoon serving — 150 mg and 7.5 g in one tablespoon. High fructose corn syrup is its first ingredient; honey comes fourth, behind tomato paste. No Scoville number is published, and none would mean anything: the label declares no chile at all.
The particulars
| base | sweet-tomato |
|---|---|
| heat | none |
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · Sweet Baby Ray's Inc. |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | — |
| vinegar | #2 on the label |
| butter or oil | — |
| tomato | #3 on the label |
| sugar | #1 on the label |
| soy sauce | — |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 150 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 7.5 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | high fructose corn syrup, distilled vinegar, tomato paste, honey, modified food starch, salt, natural flavor, caramel color, pineapple juice concentrate, spices, sodium benzoate, natural smoke flavor, molasses, garlic, corn syrup, sugar, tamarind |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. Sweet Baby Ray's Honey Barbecue Sauce, 28 oz. Label serving is 2 Tbsp (37 g); sodium 300 mg and sugars 15 g per serving, so 150 mg and 7.5 g per tablespoon. sugar_rank 1 is high fructose corn syrup; the honey the sauce is named for sits at 4, and corn syrup and sugar appear again at 15 and 16. pepper_rank is 0 — no chile is named anywhere on the label. No heat word, no Scoville number. 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.
Barbecue Sauce I
- ¼ cup (62.5 mL) brown sugar
- 1 tbsp (15 mL) garlic powder
- 1 tbsp (15 mL) paprika powder
- 2 tsp (10 mL) salt
- 1 heaping tsp (6.66 mL) of ground coffee beans
- 1 cup (250 mL) ketchup
- ½ cup (125 mL) water
- 3 tbsp (45 mL) white vinegar
- A shot of whiskey or ½ shot of cognac
- A squeeze of lemon juice
Wikibooks Cookbook, CC BY-SA 4.0, copied in full with the source named. No honey in it — this is the ketchup-and-brown-sugar base a honey sauce is a variation on.
Not to be confused with
- Hot honey — Tomato. Honey barbecue has it and is thick and red; hot honey is honey, chillies and vinegar, and pours.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Buffalo wing · link
- Pizza Hut · link
- Sweet Baby Ray's Honey Barbecue Sauce — branded food label (FDC ID 2017251) · link
- Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping — Marion Harland, 1906 · link
- Cookbook:Barbecue Sauce I · 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.