Best TGI Fridays Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce - Classic Recipe

Best TGI Fridays Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce Easy Recipe

I've been experimenting with various BBQ sauces over the past year, creating / refining the classics like Arron Franklin's Espresso BBQ sauce and Snow's Totsies BBQ Mop Sauce to complement BBQ brisket. This week however, BBQ chicken & BBQ pulled pork were on the menu, so a different kind of BBQ sauce was required (less vinegar to cut through the fattiness of BBQ brisket).

The TGI Fridays Jack Daniels BBQ sauce is a sweet & versatile sauce that TGI Fridays serve with pretty much all of their BBQ meat type dishes - because it's so good! It truly is a classic BBQ sauce, so I experimented with 4 difference recipe variants to arrive at what I consider to be the best BBQ sauce recipe below (but the variants are documented in the notes with their various advantages / disadvantages).

This versatile BBQ sauce works with a variety of meats & fish but due to it's sweetness, is ideal for salmon, pork ribs & chicken.

TGI Fridays Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce Ingredients

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup pineapple juice

1/2 cup water

¼ cup teriyaki sauce

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon onion powder

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon Jack Daniels / bourbon whiskey

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Making the sauce is simple - mix all the ingredients in a saucepan and gently simmer for around 20 minutes. The resulting BBQ sauce is thinner than other BBQ sauces I make (though not as thin as Snow's BBQ mop), making it ideal for dipping & glazing.

Variations on TGI Fridays Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce

1. Adding ketchup makes the BBQ sauce more traditional / thickens things up and creates a BBQ sauce more suitable for burgers
2. Addition of apple cider vinegar (this variation aimed to create a 'sharper' BBQ sauce, more suitable for fatty meats / cut down on the sweetness but I don't recommended)
3. Swapping out the teriyaki sauce for hoisin sauce is an interesting option, adding an Asian touch, which works well if you are doing BBQ duck. If you are swapping out for hoisin, I'd recommend adding in 1 tablespoon of ground ginger as well.
4. Upping the onion, garlic & cayenne pepper does amp up the overall BBQ sauce's intensity but part of the pleasure of this sauce is it's looseness means you can enjoy lots of it at your BBQ without being overwhelmed
5. There are Jack Daniels BBQ sauce recipes that suggest addition of pureed pineapple, but this makes the BBQ sauce a bit grainy & rough unlike the TGI Friday's variant, so I advice against it. 

It would appear the key to the success of differentiating this TGI Fridays Jack Daniels BBQ sauce from other more traditional sweet BBQ sauces is the pineapple juice & teriyaki sauce. I've made hundreds of other BBQ sauces that are ketchup & brown-sugar based but this TGI Friday's copy cat recipe is notable for it's pineapple sweetness, which works ever so well with chicken & salmon.

All kinds of BBQ pork getting TGI Friday's Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce treatment (only at very end of BBQ process to stop it burning)