"steak sauce" news and stories

The maker of Castle Sauce, a distinctively tangy steak sauce -- fashioned after a beloved local condiment that vanished from the Greensboro, N.C. scene in 2007 -- believes he's come even closer to replicating the original product.

Relying on chemical analysis and "a little bit of common sense," Dwight Thomas recently revised his recipe to include a still-secret missing ingredient. "We now have it pretty much dead-on," Thomas says. "I had forty-some people at my house and only one could tell the difference."

Thomas' guests probably weren't just being polite. Greensboro residents are connoisseurs of the ketchupy, mustardy blend that got its start in 1929 at the Boar and Castle, a burger joint popular with teenagers. "It was a necking place, to be honest," Thomas recalls. "If you got there in time to get a spot under the wisteria, you spent all night there."

When I was little, my Mom used to make fabulous steaks, but they were always marinated before cooking, usually in some variation of soy sauce and garlic. If they weren't marinated steaks, then they were "sauced" after cooking with either a homemade Asian version of mushroom sauce, or with...A-1. After that, I couldn't eat a steak without saucing it with everything from bottled steak sauce to Tabasco to sriracha to even regular ol' gravy.

Today however, when I eat a steak, I like it rubbed with salt, maybe a little pepper, and I never ever put any kind of sauce on it. It's so wrong. It feels like cheating. It feels like I am taking away from the point of eating a medium rare steak. It feels like I am tainting the meat. So many steakhouses offer their steaks with a variety of sauce like Bearnaise, a Cabernet reduction, etc. Obviously, there are people out there who love sauce on their steaks, but I can't do it. I want to taste the beefy goodness of my medium rare steak. The strange thing is, for everything else, from salads to fish, I over sauce.

Do you "sauce?" If so, with what? If not, why not?