Traeger Rub And Sauce Review

Reviewed by Nia Lock

In this house, we barbecue all year round, and so we’re always interested to try new products such as rubs and sauces. Traeger are a well known supplier of quality barbecues and having browsed their website recently, my husband was particularly interested to try out their brand of rubs and sauces.

The products arrived nicely packaged in printed paper and a cardboard box, and both were quite large packages. The bottle contained 533g of sauce and the tin contained 262g of dry rub.

The rub we tried was called Traeger rub and is their signature blend. It’s main flavour notes are chilli and garlic but the ingredients, which are all natural, include paprika, basil and cane molasses. When you open the tin the smell that comes out is amazing.

We tried this rub on a spatchcock chicken and were impressed by the tastiness of it. Often rubs don’t really produce much other than a hint of flavour on the very outside of the meat but this made quite an impact and was particularly good on the wings. The balance of flavour was very good and this is definitely a mixture we’d be looking to use again in future. It’s slightly smoky but not enough to distress the children and although the description says it’s suitable for any protein, it also made for super tasty potato wedges on the barbecue and I think it would be nice on sweetcorn as well. Theoretically it’s pretty similar to the rub we’d make ourselves but somehow it just had a better flavour balance than we’ve been able to achieve by ourselves.

I liked the easy to close aluminium tin the rub came in. The attractiveness of the packaging paired with a quality rub made this the perfect present for my barbecue dedicated husband, he will surely be getting Traeger rub for Christmas as well as some of the other interesting rubs I’ve seen on their website such as the coffee rub and the prime rib rub. He’ll appreciate a present he can use as well as trying out something new at the same time.

The Traeger sauce we tried was the Traeger ‘Que BBQ sauce. This is Traeger’s signature sauce and comes in a plastic bottle with a wide mouth for easy pouring. It’s dark brown in colour and fairly runny in consistency, perfect for the children who would eat a lake of sauce with every meal if they were in charge. In terms of flavour it is very sweet and gently smoky, not spicy at all and not too vinegary. When you taste it on it’s own the sauce seems a bit too sweet but it actually paired really well with everything we tried it on, chicken, wedges, pulled pork and enhanced those flavours much better than the bbq sauce we were previously eating. It is a very sticky sauce which is a little bit expensive but as a Christmas gift it’s nice to have something a little bit special and I usually find my husband very hard to buy for.

Rating: 4/5

RRP: rub – £9.99, sauce – £9.99

Website: https://www.traeger.com/uk/en

Link to buy the rub: https://www.traeger.com/uk/en/rubs-spices/traeger

Link to buy the sauce: https://www.traeger.com/uk/en/sauces/traeger-bbq