When a south Louisiana restaurateur named Jack Miller created a new barbecue sauce to use in his Ville Platte restaurant, the American Inn, he had no way of knowing that the concoction would go on to play a starring role at the cookout for generations of Louisiana families.
Jack Miller's Bar-B-Que Sauce, which Miller began selling to the public in 1955, is a condiment heavy-weight for Cajun households. Seventy years later, the brand is so well-loved that it's even spawned a new menu item at restaurants and lunch counters across Acadiana: the Jack Miller's burger.
It's a tender patty kept hot and moist in a vat of Jack Miller's, before being placed on a bun, dressed with more sauce, and wrapped in foil so the bun steams together with the hamburger and barbecue sauce. It's especially satisfying when purchased from a cart at a festival or some other outdoor event. The result is a flavor explosion that can't be replicated with any other sauce anywhere else in the country.
The sauce's singularity is part of the appeal. Unlike other styles of barbecue sauce, Jack Miller's is textural — you can see and taste the ingredients. The flavor is strong and savory but well-balanced, and it almost tastes the way it smells when a pot of Trinity on the stove is cooked down to practically nothing.
It elevates a sausage po-boy. It adds an unforgettable kick to pulled pork. And through the decades, it's become closely entwined with Cajun barbecue — a BBQ experience that too often plays second fiddle to better-known regional styles from Texas, Memphis and the Carolinas.
READ MORE: Looking for good Louisiana barbecue? These Cajun spots are in a class of their own.
The accidental BBQ sauce
Jack Miller was known for keeping things simple. After opening the American Inn in 1941, he started selling hamburgers, but ground beef was difficult to find once rationing began during World War II. So Miller turned to barbecuing chickens he purchased from Ville Platte locals, and he needed a tasty sauce.
"He did these barbecue lunches, and it stayed like that until he gave up the idea of opening other restaurants because he was having trouble sourcing enough for his use," said Kermit Miller, Jack Miller's son.
The 79-year-old CEO remembers that people started asking to buy the sauce on its own around 1953, and by 1962, Jack Miller had closed the restaurant and turned it into a mini barbecue sauce factory.
The operation has changed very little over the past 70 years. Kermit Miller joined his father as a partner in the business around 1970, after he left the Navy. They gradually bought machinery to increase production while keeping the recipe exactly the same.
"It's still everything that he used back in the '50s, when he first started," said Miller. "He would mix it like a baker, pouring the salt and seasonings in his hand and measuring it out. I had to watch him, weigh it all out, and write it down."
Locally sourced products are the base of the barbecue sauce. Jack Miller's uses mustard, hot sauce and other items from Cajun Chef, based in St. Martinville, and one of the machines still in use on the packaging line was purchased from Tony Chachere's Creole Foods in Opelousas.
It's also still very much a family business. Based in a small factory and warehouse on Jack Miller Road in the southeast corner of Ville Platte, Kermit Miller and his son, Christian, outsource sales and distribution while placing all their attention on the products, which includes Jack Miller's Cajun Seasoning and Cajun Dip — a Jack Miller's inspired cocktail sauce that stands in for a zestier ketchup.
"We're the ones making the sauce every day. It's a full hands-on operation," said Christian Miller, who started working for the company full time after pursuing a career as a musician. He now lives with his family next door to where Jack Miller's is made.
The goal is to continue creating a "Cajun product" for the Acadiana area and for those who leave to have a taste of home that follows them.
"We're going to keep doing what we're doing as long as we can and keep it going for the Acadiana area," Christian Miller said, "and the people who've been raised on it for three, four generations."
A Cajun sauce for Cajun BBQ
Louisiana barbecue is all about the seasoning instincts honed in Cajun cooking, said Brandon Hunt, an Acadiana barbecue chef and founder of Home Grill Advantage and the Stirrin' The Pot podcast. A lot of the technique is inspired by Texas barbecue, he said. Other regional styles, like Kansas City and South Carolina, differentiate with levels of sweetness and vinegar in the sauce.
"Louisiana is really unique in how we incorporate our spice into our barbecue, because Louisiana is really in your face with flavor and that's one of the things we pride ourselves on," he said. " We have a hodgepodge of ethnic backgrounds and influences here, and the way we incorporate that into our cooking in general translates to our barbecue."
Jack Miller's has been in line with that tradition for decades now. After all, the recipe was created the same way Cajun chefs build a gumbo — building and cooking down until the disparate flavors merge into something unforgettable.
The sauce is still made the same way every morning when Kermit Miller gets to the office and starts cooking the first batch of the day.
Said Hunt: "Cajun cooks will just have onions, bell pepper and celery in a pan and cook that down until it's almost obliterated and make a gravy from that. That's just inherently creating different flavor profiles that you can build on top of. We have really good barbecue in Louisiana — we have some world champions here — and that's because we have really good cooks that know how to build flavor. We take what's available to us and build incredible flavors on top of that, and I think our barbecue is no different."
According to the Millers, this is the right way to use Jack Miller's Bar-B-Que Sauce — as a base for building the best flavors for your dish. For generations of Acadiana residents, the sauce has earned such a reputation as a regional ingredient it's hard to imagine doctoring it up. However, when it comes to barbecuing in Cajun country, the more personal it is the better.
"I have an old VCR tape somewhere of my grandfather, Jack Miller, sitting in that chair right there saying, 'this is a base sauce,'" said Christian Miller. "I'm thinking, man, it's got 17 ingredients already, and you call that the base? But he said, 'You add more hot sauce, add some wine, add some butter. Do what you want with it.'"
That's what makes it a true Cajun barbecue sauce — or, as the Millers say, "a barbecue sauce with a Cajun accent." It plays well with all the other flavors of Cajun country but is delicious — and distinctive — all on its own.