Barbecue Chicken with Alabama White Sauce

According to the history on their website. Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Alabama, where Alabama-style white sauce was invented by Big Bob himself, started as a hand-dug pit and a table made of wooden planks nailed to a tree in Bob Gibson’s backyard. This was in 1925, nearly 100 years ago, and Big Bob’s friends encouraged him to leave the railroad work he’d been doing and make a name for himself in barbecue instead. Smoking pork and chicken over hickory and serving them with his unique mayonnaise-based white BBQ sauce, moving from storefront to slightly larger storefront, that’s what Big Bob did.

Why the white sauce? Was it a way to keep the chicken moist and fatty during cooking, as Chris Lilly, the current executive chef of Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, theorizes? Does it perhaps have anything to do with the old saw that white people put mayonnaise on everything? It is difficult to say at this point, but in any case, the idea of barbecue with white sauce stuck–in Decatur, anyway. Alabama-style barbecue doesn’t get the press that Texas, or Kansas City, or Memphis, or even North Carolina-style (Eastern *or* Lexington) barbecue does. But it exists as a recognized style, and Big Bob’s has even won plenty of awards in barbecue competitions–though, it must be said, often with a sauce other than their signature white sauce.

I’ve mentioned Alabama white sauce on the site before–briefly, when discussing barbecue sandwiches in general waaaaaay back in the first couple months of the site’s existence, and again recently, when I had these (really very good) chicken wings with white sauce while in Knoxville investigating their steamed hoagies.

I also mentioned it on Tiktok a while back while discussing recipes to use the Lebanese garlic sauce Toum in instead of mayonnaise, and then followed up by making a TikTok video where I did just that.

@sandwichidiot Finally made that smoked chicken with Alabama white sauce made from toum. The horseradish and garlic balanced out somehow: big flavors but it worked! #toum #smokedchicken #alabamawhitesauce ♬ Alabama Pines – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

I’ve made Alabama white sauce several times, combining different features of different recipes and landing on something like this for my current version:

My version of the Alabama white sauce has some capsaicin heat from the cayenne as well as that sinus-clearing heat that comes from hot horseradish and mustard, along with a creamy sweet/tart character that caramelizes well on the grill but tastes just fine mixed into shredded chicken as well. When I make it with toum instead of mayonnaise, it also has a massive hit of raw garlic. However, this month I made it using Duke’s mayonnaise, which is popular throughout much of the South in the US.

At Big Bob Gibson’s, the chickens are “split”–their split chickens look very much like a spatchcocked chicken to me, but split is the term they use–seasoned with salt and pepper, smoked over hickory, and then dipped fully into a vat of white sauce before being chopped up and served by the quarter or half, as wings, or as a sandwich featuring a boneless breast filet.

I can see from that video that the white sauce they use at Big Bob Gibson’s is far thinner than mine, likely meaning a higher vinegar-to-mayo ratio in their sauce. This video from their pitmaster Chris Lilly, though it is not purporting to show the actual Gibson’s white sauce recipe, uses a ratio of 3:5 rather than the 1:4 I use. I also spatchcock my chickens, though my process is slightly different than theirs, and I dry-brine them for a day or two first in a Montreal-style chicken seasoning blend (salt, pepper, onion, garlic, dried citrus zest, coriander, paprika, herbs) rather than simply seasoning them with salt and pepper. Finally, I sometimes vary the wood I use, though this time I did smoke them with hickory like they do down in Decatur.

Generally though when I’m making a smoked chicken sandwich though I’ll chop or pull the chicken, teasing the strands of meat apart into a texture similar to that of pulled pork.

Then of course I sauce the meat. Now with pulled pork I don’t necessarily do this–I leave it to each individual how much sauce they’d like to add, and which sauce–but with chicken and white sauce I like getting that sauce right into the meat.

For the sandwich, I put a good thick layer of the shredded, sauced chicken on the lower half of a hamburger bun, add a little extra sauce, some pickle slices, and then the top half of the bun. That’s it. Some folks use coleslaw instead of the pickles, and that’s fine, I do it too sometimes. But for this sandwich I like the pickles.

It’s not much to look at. That’s a good sandwich though. My dry-brine and spatchcock method results in chicken that’s plenty juicy both in the white and dark meat, with a mild smoke flavor that is punctuated by the sauce’s acidity and heat. The pickles provide a bit of briny crunch to change things up a bit and the squishy hamburger buns are only there to provide a handy, edible carrying case for the other ingredients.

But today, I also chose to make a sandwich closer to what they serve at Big Bob Gibson’s, with a whole piece of chicken glazed in white sauce. Only I didn’t want to use a boring piece of breast meat. So I seasoned some boneless, skinless chicken thighs with the same rub I used for the whole chicken and smoked them, then finished them under the broiler, brushing each side with white sauce 3 times until the water in the sauce boiled away, the remaining fats and sugars caramelizing into thin, crisp shell. Then I served it in a hamburger bun with pickles and a little extra sauce, same as before.

OK. Forget what I said about serving chicken with Alabama white sauce shredded before. This is the way I should be making it from now on.

Chicken thigh is a fatty and forgiving meat that can be cooked and cooked again without drying out and becoming unpleasant, allowing it to remain relatively moist while caramelizing multiple layers of Alabama white sauce on its surface. In fact, I had left these thighs in the smoker too long and was afraid they were overdone, but reheated under the broiler, bathed multiple times in my white sauce, they made the best Alabama white sauce chicken sandwich I’d had yet. The caramelization brings out the sweetness of the sauce, while taming some of its acidity and heat, but a little extra sauce helps bring some of that back, and of course the pickles are key.

But “real” chicken with white sauce the way they make it at Big Bob Gibson’s isn’t done any of the ways I’ve made it so far. The hickory-smoked chickens are dipped entirely in the white sauce after smoking, then presumably held until they are served.

I am not making and/or buying enough of this white sauce to fill a vat that I can dip a whole chicken into. But I will buy a bottle of the commercially-available version of Big Bob Gibson’s sauce to try and make this version as close as possible to the real thing.

A long-overdue trip to North Carolina to visit my brother interrupted this sandwich investigation, and when I got back I was not feeling motivated enough to go through my entire laborious process of dry-brining then smoking a chicken. I am lucky enough though to have a good local barbecue joint a couple miles from my house called Exsenators. My usual order from Exsenators is a classic Chicago-style tip-link combo but their smoked chicken–which comes as a half or “whole” chicken with bread and fries usually–is very well done.

I picked up the chicken in the late afternoon and brushed it thoroughly with Big Bob’s white sauce, top and bottom, holding it on a rack over a baking pan until I was ready to serve.

After an hour or two, much of the sauce had either settled into the little valleys on the surface of the chicken, or dripped off the sides onto the pan, leaving the skin glistening but without much visible sauce. I brushed a little more on, tented some foil over the pan, and heated the chicken at 350° for 15 minutes

There is something happening here, for sure. I like the flavor of my sauce better on its own but the vinegar in the Big Bob Gibson white sauce penetrates into the chicken’s meat and skin somehow, causing some alchemical reaction that brightens the flavor considerably. Between my previous sandwich, with the caramelized sauce coating that deliciously smoky chicken thigh, and this one, with the Gibson sauce working its magic on a chicken breast, I prefer the former–but just barely.

I’ll have to get the Big Bob sauce again and play with the variables–will it caramelize as nicely as mine did? Will my sauce have a similar effect on chicken if it’s brushed over the entire surface and held? What if I change the vinegar-to-mayonnaise ratio in my recipe and leave everything else the same, can I capture some of that Big Bob’s magic?

I’ll find out over the next few weeks and months, because the family is enjoying smoked chicken with Alabama white sauce and wants more. But I have to call it a day for this writeup and move on to other sandwiches. Mayonnaise is an unexpected base for such a delicious barbecue sauce, but there is something special that happens when Alabama white sauce is applied to smoked chicken.