Take a sauce-fueled road trip through the Carolinas, experience the Super Bowl of Swine, plan your next big cookout, and more.
When most people consider barbecue sauce, they likely think of thick, sweet tomato-based versions slathered on ribs and chicken. But the Carolinas have their own ways of making barbecue finger-licking.
North and South Carolina span roughly 86,000 square miles, across which there are probably just as many barbecue sauce variations. Pitmasters in eastern North Carolina use thin vinegar-and-hot-pepper-based sauces for whole hog, while those in the western part of the state specialize in a tomato- or ketchup-based “dip” for basting sliced pork shoulders. South Carolinian cooks employ spiced vinegar-based sauces, and mustard-based sauces as well.
These distinct sauce styles are all rooted in traditions that developed in the coastal South, influenced by shifting populations, regional preferences, and supply chains.
“[People] think sauce defines the barbecue,” says Hector Garate, the owner and pitmaster at Palmira Barbecue in Charleston, South Carolina. “It doesn’t—the cook does.”
Mapping the geographic ranges and evolutionary paths of barbecue sauce is one way to understand the rich culinary history of the Carolinas. It’s also a delicious way to plan a road trip. While it isn’t possible to neatly chart where one sauce tradition ends and another begins, that’s all the more reason to plot a meandering path through the Carolinas—and wear pants with some give in the waist.
Here are four itineraries for eating your way through the Carolina barbecue sauce trail.
Eastern North Carolina and the Pee Dee
Acid-Forward Sauce and Whole-Hog Cooking
Vinegar-based sauces are found across both states, but they remain especially popular in eastern North Carolina, as well as the Pee Dee, an area comprising the borderlands of southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina along the Great Pee Dee River.
This tradition can be traced to the mingling of British and West African influences that began in the late 1600s. English colonists from Barbados and Bermuda settled in the region during that time, bringing with them enslaved Africans with their own abundant culinary heritage. Whole hogs, widely available and suitable for slow open-fire cooking that fed large communal gatherings, became central to the area’s emerging cuisine.
The smaller heritage breeds available had higher fat content and varied muscle structure when compared to modern commodity pork. Acidic sauces helped preserve and flavor the meat, while also providing a tangy kick to cut through its deep fattiness.
Today, whole-hog barbecue remains dominant in the region. Pigs are cooked whole over wood, broken down, and then dressed with a mixture of cider vinegar, salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper. The sauce is thin and sharply acidic, designed to be absorbed into the chopped meat.
The Piedmont, between Raleigh and Charlotte
Dip Sauce and Pork Shoulder
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, towns exploded across the Piedmont, an expanse of rolling hills sandwiched between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. In North Carolina, the area stretches roughly from Raleigh and Durham in the east to Charlotte in the southwest.
With the population boom came new restaurants that specialized in the region’s barbecue traditions. At the same time, industrial production of larger, leaner hogs expanded, and pork shoulders became more practical to cook. All of this influenced how pitmasters cooked.
Tomato-based sauces known as dip entered the picture in the late 1800s, when companies like Heinz made ketchup inexpensive and widely available. The sauce incorporates ketchup or tomato paste into a vinegar base along with sugar and spices. The resulting sauce is redder, thicker, and a touch sweeter than its purely vinegar-based brethren. It notably became popular in Lexington, North Carolina, where it’s known simply as Lexington dip. This sauce is also the basis for the city’s iconic, red-tinged Lexington coleslaw, which relies on a mixture of ketchup and hot sauce.
The Midlands
Mustard Sauce
In the Midlands of central South Carolina, a tract of land east of the Piedmont and west of the Lowcountry, mustard-based barbecue developed alongside vinegar traditions. Often referred to as Carolina Gold, these sauces are typically made from yellow mustard, vinegar, brown sugar, and spices such as paprika or cayenne. Compared to vinegar-based sauces, they are thicker and sweeter, coating the meat more visibly while maintaining a sharp acidic base.
Mustard-based barbecue is tied directly to Melvin’s BBQ and its founding family, the Bessingers, which helped spread the style across much of South Carolina in the 20th century. David Bessinger, the third-generation owner and pitmaster, traces the restaurant’s sauce back to his grandfather, Big Joe Bessinger, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in the 1930s.
“Joe invented the mustard-based sauce to use on the hogs he cooked in the ground,” Bessinger says. Members of the family later opened restaurants throughout the Midlands and Lowcountry.*
But mustard traditions in South Carolina go back even further, Bessinger says. “There was a large influx of Germans who settled in the area around Orangeburg in the middle 1700s,” he explains. “They brought over the tradition of using mustard in their recipes.”