Where “Sauce That” Came From

“Sauce That” — the single whose video won five awards in Los Angeles — came out of a weekend in Port Aransas, Texas.

I was there for work. I was filming with Cruising Kitchens, where I worked from January 2021 to September 2024, and we were at Palmfest, which is a festival and also a serious barbecue competition — large entry fee, large prize, people who had travelled to win it.

I was not competing

I want to be clear about that from the start, because the song is going to make somebody assume otherwise. I was the guy with the camera crew. I had no pit, no team, no business being near any of it.

Which turned out to be the ideal position from which to be converted.

The all-nighter

Competition barbecue runs overnight because the cook does. These were people committed to standing by a fire until the sun came up.

And they were not just waiting. They were spritzing on a schedule — spraying the meat at set intervals to keep the surface from drying out, because a dry surface stalls the smoke and wrecks the bark. Somebody had decided the interval. Somebody was keeping to it, at three in the morning, having already been awake all day.

Then there were the differences. Every pit had slightly different technique. Different seasonings, different wood, different ideas about wrapping and when. Same animal, same fire, same night, and a dozen genuinely different philosophies running in parallel twenty feet apart.

That is what got me. Not the food yet — the dedication. The willingness to stay up all night over a variable most people would never detect.

Then I ate it

And the flavour was incredible. Not good-for-a-festival. Genuinely some of the best I have had.

One pit in particular reset my idea of what was possible: El Rey. I am not sure I ever got his full name, but that is his barbecue in my memory of that weekend, and the song exists partly because of it.

That combination — watching the obsessive overnight process and then tasting what it produced — is the whole song. You cannot separate the flavour from the hours. The hours are the flavour, which is the low and slow thing I have been writing about ever since.

What came out

A comedic song about sauce, by a man with no pit and no standing, which is a hypocrisy I am entirely aware of.

It also turned barbecue into a permanent fixture of this project — the smoke, the patience, the stall. One of the four things this record keeps circling.

And the video went on to win Best Comedy and Best Experimental from the same jury. From a weekend in Port Aransas where I was holding somebody else’s equipment.