How to make chicago mild sauce

Barton J. Taylor now lives about 20 miles east of Atlanta in Lithonia, Ga., but the born-and-raised Chicagoan still misses what he calls "a taste of home": mild sauce, the sweet, slightly spicy condiment prevalent at chicken joints and other restaurants on the city's South and West sides. So, Taylor wrote in to our new reader-driven series, What's the Story?, asking about the sauce's origin and what goes into a good mild sauce.

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"You take Chicago's culinary palate for granted until you leave Chicago," says Taylor, who grew up in the city's South Shore neighborhood, graduated from Whitney Young High School and, after leaving for college, moved back to work for CPS. He lived in Chicago for nine of his adult years before he left to take a job as chief of staff at Teach for America in Georgia — where there's no mild sauce to be found.

"Unless you are in Chicago or from Chicago, people have no idea what (mild sauce) is," says Samuel Marshall, a private chef who lives in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.

When RedEye dining critic Michael Nagrant moved to Chicago from Detroit about 16 years ago, he had never heard of mild sauce, he says — and he thinks he might never have discovered it if he hadn't made an effort to leave his North Side neighborhood to eat. His comment seems borne out by online discussions I found on Chowhound about mild sauce. The North Siders sound mystified; those from the city's South and West sides know all about it.

So what is this Chicago thing called mild sauce? When Taylor searched for a recipe to make at home, he got "20 different answers," he says.

Charlotte Lyons, former food editor of Ebony magazine, describes mild sauce as a combination of hot sauce, ketchup and barbecue sauce. "It's great on chicken, fish, french fries etc.," she wrote in an email.

Gary Wiviott, pitmaster at Lincoln Park's Barn & Company, guesses mild sauce's proportions are 5 parts barbecue sauce to 2 parts ketchup and 1 part hot sauce.

"Mild sauce is much sweeter and less complex" than barbecue sauce, says Peter Engler, a former University of Chicago genetic research scientist who is widely considered an expert on South Side dishes (he once appeared on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" to explain the South Side mother-in-law sandwich to the host). "Some mild sauces are almost translucent, and (the sauce is) almost always sweet."

Though, in a follow-up email, Engler wrote that he's also sampled mild sauces that would "easily pass" as barbecue sauce, underscoring the range of options out there.

"Mild sauce" is more a flavor designation than an exact recipe, says Allison E. Collins, chief executive officer of Select Brands LLC., Chicago-based maker of Argia B's Mumbo Sauce, an iconic bottled barbecue sauce. Essentially, she says, what makes mild sauce mild sauce is that it isn't hot. Many restaurateurs use barbecue sauce as a base for mild sauce but "doctor it up" in different ways, she says.

All this may explain why mild sauce has different tastes depending on where you go to find it. Taylor has thoughts on what he's looking for: "It needs to be a little sweet and ... not hot, but have a little pucker," he says, noting the consistency should be somewhere between ketchup and hot sauce.

But mild sauce shouldn't taste too much like ketchup, warns Nagrant. "All the bad ones, I wonder if they're just ketchup because they're that ketchupy," he says. "The best ones have a little pepperiness or a sweet spice note … that probably came from the barbecue sauce."

"I think most South Siders have a pretty clear idea what to expect when asking for mild," adds Engler, a longtime South Sider himself. In that respect, you can think of it like ketchup: There are different ways to make it, but at the end of the day, you know what you're expecting when you order it.

•••

Having lived on Chicago's North Side for 13 years, I'm ashamed to admit I don't remember ever tasting mild sauce.

In the name of research, I took off from Tribune Tower with two friends and spent an afternoon on Chicago's South Side visiting two of the best-known purveyors: Harold's Chicken Shack and Uncle Remus Saucy Fried Chicken. At the suggestion of Nagrant, who spoke of its "outlier" sauce, I also visited Hienie's Shrimp House in the South Deering neighborhood.

I ordered the 1/2 "regular," which was white and dark pieces of fried chicken, with fries and extra sauce, at Harold's Chicken Shack #24 at 407 E. 75th St. in the Chatham neighborhood. I thought the extra sauce would come in a little plastic container for me to taste separately. No. The chicken and fries arrived blanketed in a dark, ruddy sauce that was tangy and a little bit sweet. The sauce acted almost like a glaze on the chicken pieces, gently clinging to the crackling crisp coating.

Uncle Remus, now a local chain with four locations, is one of the best places in Chicago to try mild sauce, a beloved condiment on Chicago's South and West Sides. A customer walks through the restaurant at 737 E. 47th St. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)

The Uncle Remus restaurant at 737 E. 47th St. in Bronzeville served a reddish/orange mild sauce that was sweeter than at Harold's and sported a warm spice note. Taylor's words to me on the telephone came to mind as I sampled the saucy chicken. He said the Uncle Remus version was "a little stickier" than Harold's, "with an almost honey sort of taste." The chicken came sauced, while the fried okra I ordered on the side was easily dunked into the small plastic containers of extra sauce.

At Hienie's, 10359 S. Torrence Ave., my order was fried chicken with fries and fried shrimp. This sauce came on the side, was red and had a distinct ketchup flavor.

All three versions were similar yet different, like a trio of sisters. I liked that. All fulfilled their role in uplifting the bird flavorwise. I'll never look at fried chicken in quite the same way again.

•••

After my day sampling mild sauce, I'm as curious as Taylor about its origin. Where did it come from? Who created it?

"It's very debatable who started it, but of course I'd say it was my dad," says Charmaine Rickette, chief executive officer of Uncle Remus, which her parents founded in 1964. Rickette loves mild sauce so much that she carries it in her car, "so if I go to Portillo's, I can put mild sauce on my hot dog."

When her parents launched their business, originally called Royal Chicken, customers were offered a choice of hot sauce or ketchup, she says. When people started mixing them together, her father, Gus Rickette Sr., began experimenting with a combination of ketchup, hot sauce and barbecue sauce until he came up with a proprietary blend.

"Mild sauce was not mild sauce until we created it," she says.

But Bruce Kraig, a local food historian and co-editor of upcoming book "The Chicago Food Encyclopedia," can't confirm that statement. "I know that it's South Side, served in chicken shacks and so likely invented (at one of them). Other than that, I don't know," he wrote in an email.

Mild sauce is a staple at Harold's Chicken Shack, which now has locations all over the city. (Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune)

I ask Collins, of Argia B's Mumbo Sauce, what she knows of mild sauce's origin story. She says her father, Argia B. Collins, opened his first barbecue restaurant in 1950. When employees asked customers if they wanted their food spicy or not, they'd ask for "the mild sauce."

"Consumers don't know what the brand is," Collins says. "(But) they know they don't want it hot. 'Give me the mild sauce.'"

Collins' comment squares with one of Nagrant's beliefs: that mild sauce developed as a reaction against hot sauce.

Or maybe it was born out of an "oops!" moment. That's what Charla Draper thinks. She's owner of It's a Food Biz! — a Chicago-based consulting food marketing firm.

"Most places that serve (mild sauce) have (ketchup and barbecue sauce) in large pump-style containers or large squeeze bottles, says Draper, who runs food blog Chow-Chow & Soul. "At some point, in a busy kitchen, the ketchup was added by mistake to the barbecue sauce (container) or vice versa. When it was time to taste, folk realized ... it was pretty good!"

I send a copy of a mild sauce recipe from Marshall, the Bronzeville chef, to Michael Twitty, a Rockville, Md.-based food historian, blogger at www.afroculinaria.com and author of upcoming memoir "The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African-American Culinary History in the Old South."

"That's a very Mississippi-type easy breezy tomato based bbq sauce," he writes back, adding that some version of mild sauce probably made its way to Chicago during the Great Migration. Both Argia B. Collins and Gus Rickette Sr. were born in Mississippi. Harold Pierce, who founded Harold's in 1950, hailed from Alabama.

What does Taylor think of Marshall's mild sauce?

"Verdict: looked and smelled like mild sauce. Tasted like mild sauce that was missing either a splash of hot sauce and/or tablespoon of sugar," he wrote in an email.

As he keeps searching for a perfect recipe, Taylor has come up with a simple stopgap: He has been using Bonne Chere Original brand barbecue sauce when he craves mild sauce. He buys it by the gallon at L&P Wholesale Candy Co., 7047 S. State St., when he visits Chicago and takes it home in his luggage. The flavor is surprisingly similar to mild sauce, he says, and a bottle lasts about eight or nine months.

I head out to L&P, in the city's Park Manor neighborhood, to buy a bottle of Bonne Chere. The label lists high-fructose corn syrup, water, distilled vinegar, tomato paste, modified food starch and salt as the top six ingredients. The gallon plastic jug costs $7.50. We taste it in the Tribune test kitchen, alongside mild sauce from Harold's, and it's shocking how close the two are in color, consistency and flavor. But what sticks with me as much as the taste is the store receipt. In the system at L&P, Bonne Chere rings up as "Mild Sauce Original."

Twitter @billdaley

Mild sauce

Samuel Marshall, a private chef who lives in Bronzeville, developed this recipe for what he calls his version of mild sauce. Marshall uses Open Pit brand barbecue sauce and Heinz ketchup in his recipe. Warning: Tasters in the Tribune kitchen found this to be very different from the mild sauce offered at Harold's and other Chicago institutions.

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1 cup ketchup

1/2 cup barbecue sauce

2 tablespoons yellow mustard

1/4 cup water

1/2 to 1 teaspoon hot sauce (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

Combine ingredients in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Heat, whisking, until bubbly. Let cool and serve on fried chicken, fish or any other meat you desire.