Sauce boss

PASSION FRUIT Bancroft adds his special sauce to grilled cantaloupe and pineapple.

Mike Bancroft has a barbecuing mantra that he knows isn’t going to win him any friends among source-centric foodies: “Your food is only as good as what it is you put on it.” Bancroft, a scruffy teddy bear of a man, says this as he lays a couple of rib-eye steaks covered in chimichurri onto the Weber grill in his Humboldt Park backyard on the first balmy summer evening of the year. The bright-green garlicky marinade is made with Bancroft’s own jalapeño hot sauce, one of three he produces from a variety of community-garden-grown peppers and sells locally to fund his seven-year-old arts-education nonprofit Co-op Image Group (coopimage.org).

“A lot of times, the purists will say taste has to do with the ingredients being of the highest quality, and I believe in that,” Bancroft, 33, continues. “But with the right sauce you can use some mediocre ingredients and make something that tastes just as good.”

Bancroft’s dinner guests—his sister, Bridget, an arts educator; Anne Kostroski, founder of bread company Crumb; and Evan Plummer, an arts administrator with Chicago Public Schools—have come for the ’cue. Aside from the steaks, there are tender chicken thighs soaked in a brine and Mr. Mike’s Random Rub (a seasoning mix Bancroft also sells) and covered in Alabama white barbecue sauce (a mayo-based dressing made with the co-op’s jalapeño sauce and horseradish from Bancroft’s garden). Nothing on the menu hasn’t been splashed with Co-op Hot Sauce and, Bancroft says, “blessed by flame.” Even pineapple and melon get grilled and covered in Co-op’s fiery orange habanero. “Food,” Bancroft is fond of saying, “is merely a vehicle for sauce.”

That’s not to say that Bancroft isn’t fond of the vehicle. In his work with Humboldt Park youth, Bancroft’s love for food figures prominently; one of Co-op Image’s main projects is called Chi-Town Chefs. Bancroft helps a group of tweens and teens produce, shoot and edit their own cooking show to air on public-access television. A couple of months ago, Bancroft and some Co-op kids designed and constructed a food cart out of discarded campaign signs from Gov. Pat Quinn, Scott Lee Cohen and Dorothy Brown. They plan to get a permit and sell homemade foods at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival July 23–25.

Recently, with the Illinois Arts Council still delinquent on delivering this fiscal year’s grants, Bancroft has leaned heavily on a spate of fund-raising dinners and hot-sauce sales to keep Co-op afloat.

Thankfully, he says, the $5 five-ounce bottles are popular at Southport Grocery & Cafe (3552 N Southport Ave, 773-665-0100), Green Grocer (1402 W Grand Ave, 312-624-9508) and Dill Pickle Food Co-op (3039 W Fullerton Ave, 773-252-2667), as well as farmers’ markets in Edgewater, Forest Park and Logan Square. Restaurants Treat (1616 N Kedzie Ave, 773-772-1201), where Bancroft hosted the Forced Meat Festival Fundraiser in April, and Birchwood Kitchen (2211 W North Ave, 773-276-2100) even stock the spicy stuff as a condiment. “We can’t keep the sauce on the shelves,” Bancroft says, plating the now perfectly medium-rare rib eyes. “Which is pretty badass.”

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