Chinese Barbecue Sauce – P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Recipe

Barbecue Sauce Main pic

The Best Barbecue Sauce

This Chinese Barbecue Sauce is based on P.F. Chang’s recipe which is used in several different menu items, including: Spare Ribs, Pork Medallion and their Barbecue Chicken Salad.  I’ve taken the exact Restaurant size recipe and dumbed it down to a house hold portion.  And when I said this recipe is “based” on the Corporate recipe, I mean, it’s more or less the exact same one, only I cut the sugar in half.

The Barbecue Sauce Breakdown

Chang’s makes 5 gallons of this sauce at a time and 2 1/2 gallons of it is sugar.  That’s just ridiculous.  Half of their recommended sugar amount still gets you a fantastic BBQ sauce.  So rest assured, knowing now, that you have everything you need to know about the China Bistro’s Barbecue Sauce Recipe!

I’ve also got their Spare Rib Recipe and their Northern Style Short Ribs Ribs recipe already filmed and posted below.  And if you’re interested in my Oven Baked Ribs, those are listed here as well.

CLICK HERE for Barbecue Spare Ribs
CLICK HERE for Northern Style Short Ribs

CLICK HERE for Oven Baked Ribs

Chinese Barbecue Sauce Ingredients:

1 qt Ketchup
1 cup Hoisin Sauce
1 cup Plum Sauce
2 cup Sugar
1/4 tsp Five Spice Powder
1/4 tsp Baking Soda

This recipe makes 2 quarts of Chinese Barbecue Sauce.

Barbecue Pork Medallion

Barbecue Pork MedallionThis Barbecue Pork Medallion is Top Notch!

There’s a very good reason why Pork Medallions, or in this case, why my Barbecue Pork medallion is so tender.  It’s a Pork Tenderloin.  So unless you over cook or burn the meat, it’s virtually impossible to not have silver dollar sized slices that practically melt in your mouth.  The secret to my recipe is just a 24 hour marinade.  As far as the rest goes, there really isn’t much to it.  In fact you don’t even have to use any special dressing or any cure for the meat.  Just your favorite BBQ Sauce!

Honey Hickory SmokeNow let’s talk about taking it to the oven.  Again, there’s nothing to it, but the way I was first introduced to the Barbecue Pork Medallion, we were hanging 1 lbs portions with meat hooks that draped over skewers on the top rack shelf of a meat locker oven.  A pan on the bottom caught all the drippings.  It’s very common to cook ribs, thighs or poultry this way as well.  However, given that most of us don’t have restaurant size ovens in our kitchens, any pan or oven safe dish will do just fine.  After a 24 hour marinade in your favorite Barbecue sauce, 350 degrees in your oven, for an hour and a half, will get you right where you want to be when your slicing up your succulent Barbecue Pork Medallion.  And coming from a 5 dollar Tenderloin and possibly a 98 cent bottle of Honey and Hickory Smoke BBQ Sauce, like I use from Kraft, how can you go wrong.

This is the way P.F. Chang’s makes their Pork Medallion, only they use their barbecue sauce, however.  I have the recipe for that too.

CLICK HERE if you want P.F. Chang’s Barbecue Sauce Recipe

Barbecue Pork Medallion Ingredients:

1 Pork Tenderloin
1 cup Barbecue Sauce

Marinate Tenderloin in BBQ Sauce for 24 hours then bake at 350 degrees f for 1 1/2 hours.

Oven Roasted BBQ Ribs

IMG_0229BBQ Ribs Must be Tender!

Luckily I’ve learned a thing or two about BBQ Ribs.  I say luckily because I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve been able to make them for large groups of people and the last thing anyone would ever want is to bite into a tough flavorless rib, after hours of looking forward to them.  I say hours now because that’s what it’s going to take to get your BBQ Ribs to perfection.  I don’t know what your basis of comparison is or what your understanding and expectations are exactly when you are cooking BBQ Ribs so let me lightly brush up.

Time and temperature are everything, as equally as marinating and moisture.  Anyone that has ever eaten a dried out rib knows what I’m talking about.  But, just to be clear, when I order a BBQ Rib, I want it to be tender, juicy, succulent and full flavor.  I love it to be saucy but I also like it to have that fire roasted sear around the edges.  In my opinion, that’s the perfect rib.

Kraft-Barbecue-SauceSo now that you know what you can expect from this recipe, let me show just how easy it is, because this is not only going to blow your mind, it’s going to change the way you do ribs forever.  The cooking takes 3 hours, but the amount of work you put into the actual preparation literally only takes 10 minutes.  Is that awesome or what!  This is an older video recipe of mine when I first started Poor Man’s Gourmet Kitchen, so I apologize for the video quality, but I just realized I never wrote anything about it.  So that’s why I’m re-introducing it to you today.  And if you like Honey and a Smokey Taste to your ribs, I recommend you mix Krafts Honey and Hickory Smoke BBQ flavors.  It has a surprisingly great flavor, I’m serious!

BBQ Ribs Instructions:

All you need is a rack of spare ribs and your favorite BBQ Sauce.  And if you’d like an extra kick, sprinkle seafood boil seasoning over your ribs before you drowned them in sauce.  That’s it that’s all.  Separate each rib individually, or in threes, which ever you prefer.  Just make sure they get covered in a pan and baked for 2 ½ hours at 300 degrees, then uncovered and baked at 350 or taken to the BBQ grill for searing.  If you decide to leave them in the pan, it isn’t a bad idea to drain out half of the liquid accumulated in the pan from the 2 ½ hour bake.  I like to drain it and add more sauce to each rib then bake or grill for the next half hour (5 minutes on a grill).  If you do your BBQ Ribs like this, I promise you that your guests will think you spent all day on your ribs!