By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Published June 30, 2010
Once every couple of months, usually on holiday weekends, Logandale businessman Rik Eide sets up the equipment of his Great Basin Cooking Company and offers the people of his hometown the down-home barbecue flavor that has become well-known throughout the region. He will be there this weekend to celebrate the July 4th holiday. But this year he will be offering a bit more than his signature brisket, ribs, pork and poultry with all the fixin’s. This year he will also be selling his famous Papa Rik’s BBQ Sauce.
Eide spent a year and a half developing a recipe for a sauce that would perfectly complement his mellow applewood smoked barbecue flavor. The sauce is sweet, smooth and savory with a little spicy “twang” to it. It is never too heavy or sticky, allowing the very best to be brought out in whatever kind of meat it is poured. Whatever it is you may be grilling on the home barbecue, PaPa Rik’s gives it that delicious Great Basin flavor.
Eide says that the secret is in the sauce’s main ingredient: apple juice. Most commercial sauces are tomato-based and sweetened heavily with corn syrup. “That makes them much heavier and stickier,” he continued. “My goal was to make a great sauce that doesn’t stick to your moustache.”
Eide took his sauce to the renowned Best Damn BBQ Cookoff, a regional contest held in Boulder City. There he took 12th place out of 38 teams competing from all over the western United States.
Recently, Eide teamed up with Food Science Professor Mike Dunn of Brigham Young University. Dunn, an old family friend, assigned Rik’s sauce to a team of three students as their senior project. The project involved taking an idea or a recipe and guiding it all the way through the many steps of becoming a commercial-grade product. The student team conducted a full study of the recipe, produced a detailed nutrition label and got the sauce ready to be a production-level product.
The project was then sent to a USDA packer private label bottling company in northern Utah to be produced. It is now being packaged for Great Basin Food Company in shipments of 70 gallons at a time.
Papa Rik’s BBQ sauce will be available, in both the original and spicy varieties, at the Great Basin stand in Wally’s parking lot this weekend. It will be sold in distinctive pint jars for $6 per pint or two pints for $10. The sauce is also being sold at Fry’s Fruit Stand in Santa Clara, Utah. It will soon be available for purchase online at www.PaPaRiks.com.
