Why is Stubbs BBQ sauce for sale in a Prague grocery store? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Stubbs BBQ sauce for sale in a Prague grocery store?

thinkinginpublic.org

27 pointsThevet47 comments

My wife is Swedish and her family live in Sweden, but we live in the US. Every year we ask them what they want us to bring them when we make our annual pilgrimage to the homeland. My brother in law wanted bbq sauce, so my wife bought six bottles of sweet baby rays sauce. She took a photo of the bottles and sent it to him. He laughed because sweet baby rays is available in Sweden at a lot of the grocery stores. So she went back to the store and bought six bottles of Stubbs. On our last day in Stockholm I was at the grocery store and saw a new display for Stubbs. Can't win.

Rufus Teague made some sauce. Pretty good, I like it better than Stubbs, and still obscure enough they might not have seen it.

Also, I think you could kill a bear with the bottle, so it might ship well.

Out of curiosity, any idea if Sweet Baby Rays sold in Sweden is first ingredient HFCS like it is here in the US? Or do other markets use actual sugar?

Some products in Europe do use glucose-fructose syrup, but in general things like Coca-Cola will have sugar (sucrose) in them. If the sauce is imported from the US, and isn't specially manufactured for European markets, I'd expect the composition to be the same.

Buy them this: https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Rendezvous-Memphis-Original-S...

It's from Rendezvous in Memphis. Not the best barbeque in Memphis, but it's world-famous, and a good example of the style. It's impossible to find properly cooked Memphis style ribs outside of Memphis (you'll find it on menus, but it's always garbage). If you want a bbq sauce that's special and consistent, this works.

> can't win

You are buying national brands. Try something a little more local

Or even better, make some homemade! That way it is a guaranteed unique experience, and more authentic to the point anyway.

Bonus: You get to try something you've probably never done before

Easy recipe:

1 6oz can tomato paste

1 small can chipotle peppers in adobo sauce

1 onion

a few cloves garlic

salt, black pepper, some cayenne

1/3 cup of each:

white vinegar

apple cider vinegar

molasses

brown sugar

Throw it all in a blender or food processor. Taste and balance salt/sugar/sour (note it will get sweeter on cooking). Bring to a simmer on the range for 10 minutes. Done.

Easier recipe: Mix ketchup, liquid smoke, and Sriracha. Don't cook or wait or any other funny dance. You'll get all of the same ingredients and flavors as above only with fewer...uhh...ingredients. No food processor required because Heinz, Huy Fong, and Colgin already did that part for you.

You do you but that sounds bright red and nowhere near as savory.

Kind of defeats the purpose of bringing something over to Sweden though as they could also do the same thing.

Hmm that's a good point. Maybe in portions of the America's you could have better access to certain of the raw ingredients, for example, high quality dried peppers from the south

Get some hot sauce or salsa instead. Tons of local brands.

I met one of their sales reps back in 2004 when I was working at a faux high end grocery store. Easily the highest pressure sales I had seen at that level, the guy would have sold his first born for a week of endcap space. If that was indicative of their sales culture, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a shelf with it on the moon at this point.

Like the Czechs of central Texas, my ancestors started immigrating to the U.S. from Bohemia almost immediately after the 1848 Revolution [1] resulted in the elimination of feudalism in Austria.

That's a long enough time ago that there was effectively no "conversation" left between my immigrant family and the (few) who stayed behind and somehow managed to survive. Thus I'm a little skeptical that the use of Stubb's BBQ sauce in today's Czech republic is the result of a direct conversation between the immigrant population and the native one.

Instead, I suspect instead that Czechs and Americans today have more access to each other's cultures due to the fall of the Soviet Union, and increased globalism. Stubb's has been widely distributed in the U.S. for decades, and in Europe for quite some time, so it's not really surprising that it would make its way to the Czech republic.

Funnily enough, a new conversation may now be starting. My great-uncle-once-removed started using Facebook a few years ago to find long-lost relatives in the U.S., and has managed to find one or two in the Czech republic. (Still, almost all of us are in the U.S... World War One was not kind to those who stayed behind.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

This is super interesting!

I wonder if there's a clear trend or explanation for Czech-Texans moving (back?) to the Czech Republic? This does a great job of explaining a connection between Czech culture and Texas BBQ in Texas, but not how that leads to BBQ sauce hopping back across the Atlantic.

> This does a great job of explaining a connection between Czech culture and Texas BBQ in Texas, but not how that leads to BBQ sauce hopping back across the Atlantic.

Because the author made an unsubstantiated correlation. The real reason is quite simple: globalization. And it's not unique to Czech stores and is unrelated IMO to CZ/TX culture (much of which is generations enough down the line now that places like the Czech Stop or Slovacek's just use it for marketing).

Though, if you're bored this weekend, hop on over to Westfest which does have some Czech culture, but it's probably a bit watered down at this day and age as are most culture-based traditions.

TX-czech culture is heavily assimilated (like 3rd-5th generation), so while there is a large amount of cultural awareness among descendants, most do not speak fluent czech, etc.

I'm sure this leads to some 'curiosity' types of people returning, but the remaining community with a strong identity is small and so there is not like a huge back-and-forth going on.

For the reverse, I think there is some low-level awareness of czech texans by actual czechs, and at one time (not sure if this is still true) US western/country music was also a somewhat popular niche music type in CZ, so there is room for some cross pollenation.

CZ is also hugely popular with american expats and there are quite a few places which cater to them specifically in Prague, etc, which could lead to more cultural cross-exposure.

source: lived both

In the first paragraph:

"They open a dialogue between their relatives and friends that remain in the other country. Because of that, ideas about food move both ways. While grilling meat has been around since the invention of fire, Texas-style barbeque recently made its way across the Atlantic. "

My interpretation was that family that settled in Texas are influencing their family that didn't.

To echo the other sentiments here, Stubbs is a Lubbock guy who was a legend on that music scene (I'm a musician from Lubbock and it's kind of a neat, if small, scene... and like a lot of those folks, I'm super happy to be from the panhandle instead of in the panhandle).

While there is a lot of European culture out here (the German culture in Fredericksburg and the so-called Latin Colonies is interesting to me), that culture more or less is wholly unrelated to this sauce.

I suspect that the brand is about as related to the real-life Stubbs as Stubbs is related to Czech folks in central Texas, that is to say, there is very little actual connection there.

I’ve been eating Korean barbecue since college and as far as the rest of the world is concerned I went to school in the middle of nowhere. In fact we briefly had four bulgogi places until the big one ate some of the others.

Quality of life greatly improved since post-Soviet days. Plus, if money isn't an issue Czechland wins over Texas any day

reminds me of this quote

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell”

― Philip Henry Sheridan

“You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”

-Davy Crockett

Czech Texans tended to settle in Central Texas which traditionally doesn't use sauce on their meat.

East and South Texas use sauce.

Just because Kreuz does it and every person from New York that goes to Texas to write about BBQ has mentioned it doesn't mean sauceless is even ubiquitous in Central Texas. This is like some weird myth perpetuated by foodie culture.

As a Texan who's had bbq all over the state.. I agree. Sauceless is NOT ubiquitous with central Texas. In fact very much the opposite.

Right? It's like the article doesn't address the question at all.

There's a completely unsubstantiated story I heard one time that Texas Chili was a heavily localized version of a Czech or Hungarian-style Goulash.

the texas 'chicken fried steak' is basically schnizel (which is also served in cz under a different name veprove r^izek)

The other thing is Stubbs was founded by an African American gentleman from Lubbock.

Prague is the largest city in Czechia, a cultural and international hot spot, with a large student and foreign population. I'd guess this grocery store was in Zizkov.

You can get Stubbs all over Europe.

Yeah. Stubbs sauce was produced in Texas for a long time but they were bought by McCormick* (the spice company) a few years ago. They have the same global distribution powers of any other large commercial food business, so I'm sure they could get Stubbs in whatever country they forecast good demand.

* https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccormick-buys-stubbs-sauce-mak...

For a large company their sauce is pretty good. We eat it all the time. McCormick seems to have treated it well.

For a (somewhat) large company, McCormick maintains the quality of many products they make.

I believe this is why Stubb's - BBQ restaurant and popular concert venue in Austin is changing it's name in the near future.

Specifically: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/07/06/stubbs-vs...

Yeah I think this has more to do with notion that "Southern Style BBQ" is an American cuisine, and as a result many American brands that own that space are being exported worldwide. The same is true for Tex-Mex related brands gaining popularity all through Europe.

There's not a lot of Japanese people here in Ireland, but you still find Kikkoman soy sauce everywhere.

Exactly. Same for Jack Daniels', etc. I don't get the "surprise!" tone of the article. It's a food item exported and sold around the world, just like so many others have been for decades... :S

Probably the same reason we can get Nutella in basically every US grocery store? Stubbs was sold in Costco 2-packs dating back to at least my college years, so it's not exactly a boutique brand.

Perhaps it's a little less mystifying if you consider that Budweiser is a Czech beer. There have been strong culinary ties between the US and the Czech Republic for a long time.

Nope—same name but different breweries. http://business.time.com/2014/01/27/where-a-budweiser-isnt-a...

The American Budweiser is different than the original Czech Budweiser sold in the rest of the world (a much better beer, which is distributed as "Czechvar" in the US for trademark reasons); the only connection it has to the Czech Republic is that Adolphus Busch stole the name.

That's a really good question. I grew up in Austin, and while Stubb's isn't bad, I wouldn't consider it a top-tier Texas BBQ sauce. It's popular primarily because it's associated with a popular tourist music venue in Austin. I'm guessing it's a reverse transfer because the significant number of Eastern European immigrants in parts of South/Central Texas.

There is the same sauce at Coop in Switzerland.

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