Bottling the Sauce
Saturday, July 26, 2008
By Bobbi Mlynar
mlynar@emporiagazette.com
Barbecue sauces from Bad Ol’ Bern’s BBQ & Ice Cream now are available on retail shelves around the area and at the restaurant, 20 Commercial St.
Three varieties of the sauces are being bottled by Original Juans in Kansas City, Kan., and are sold at Waters True Value in Emporia, the Strong City Grocery, and Lebo Lumber; gallons are available for restaurants and other mass consumers, according to Bad Ol’ Bern’s owner, Bernie Toso.
“And it’s soon to be at quite a few more places,” Toso said. “There’s places in town that said they wanted it. With all the stuff we’ve got going on, there just hasn’t been time.”
Toso had just come off a weekend barbecue contest in Burlington and made time for an interview Monday morning, before preparing to cook for teenagers involved in Shrine Bowl activities. Toso, a Shriner, was cooking on behalf of the Blue Lodge, which planned to feed hamburgers for lunch to about 400 Shrine Band members and steaks for dinner to members of the Shrine Bowl football team on Tuesday.
At Burlington, he came away with first place in the appetizers division, second in pork butt, and third in dessert, a sherbet he made from grilled pineapple and a burnt sugar sauce served with a pina colada. His appetizer entry was a skewered melange of smoked salmon, shrimp, scallops, a little lobster tail and seared ahai tuna that he served with his Sweet and Spicy sauce. He also has bottled the Hot and Zesty sauce and an Original sauce.
Original is a basic barbecue sauce like the one he used when he opened the restaurant. Hot and Zesty has a fuller flavor.
“It’s very palatable to even somebody that doesn’t like hot sauce,” Toso said. “It’s not a hot sauce. It has no comparison to Tabasco or anything that’s going to burn your mouth.
Sweet and Spicy is the sauce he uses for competitions and for catering.
Bottling his products had been a goal since he attended a barbecue cooking class and started smoking up his neighborhood.
“I always wanted to do my own sauce, so I came up with my recipes,” he said. “Of course you got to convert them. Here, we’d use a half a cup of this or a half a gallon of this. You had to convert it to gram measurements.”
He went to a test kitchen, where specialists converted measurements and tried to duplicate the original small-batch taste in a five-gallon batch. Once the taste was right, they moved on to converting to a 55-gallon batch, he said.
Samples of the finished sauces were sent to Kansas State University, where the nutritional contents were analyzed and translated into ingredient-content labels.
“It’s a lengthy process,” Toso said. “It didn’t just happen overnight. I think I probably messed around with it, from start to finish, to probably a year and a half, maybe a little over.”
Toso currently is negotiating with distributors to send his sauces to a variety of grocery and specialty stores. He also sells them along with the smoked meats at the restaurant, from his traveling catering trailer, and at competitions.
“In the last month, we’ve fed over 7,000 people,” Toso said.
Toso and Bad Ol’ Bern’s employees and crew members catered the Symphony in the Flint Hills and had a food trailer at the Strong City Rodeo in June. His smokers can handle well over a half-ton of meats simultaneously.
“We can do 1,380 pounds of brisket at one time,” Toso said; “I just did it.”
Despite preparing the meats and sauces day and night, he never tires of the taste of barbecue.
“Actually after competition this weekend, I craved pork. I wanted some pulled pork and I was too lazy to get up and get it,” said Toso, who said he’d managed only a three-hour nap from early Friday morning, when the competition began, until Saturday night. “It makes Jack a dull boy, I’m telling you.”