Back in the day when he was a teenager at Berry High School in Hoover, Jaime Thursby used to make a beeline for the Milo’s Hamburgers shop on U.S. 31 after he finished basketball practice.
“I used to run down there to get a cheeseburger, sweet tea, fries — a super-healthy snack after practice,” he remembers.
Later, when he was living in Atlanta, Thursby made Milo’s one of his first stops whenever he came back home.
“I would always stop at the closest Milo’s to Atlanta,” he says. “I believe it was (in) Moody, just off I-20. That was always my homecoming to myself.”
Now, as the proprietor and recipe developer at the Alabama Peanut Company on Birmingham’s historic Morris Avenue, Thursby has teamed up with the folks at Milo’s Hamburgers to create a limited-time-only batch of boiled peanuts made with Milo’s legendary burger sauce.
The Milo’s sauce boiled peanuts are available for pre-order through the Alabama Peanut Company website starting today, and will be available at the shop Friday, Nov. 12, and Saturday, Nov. 13, as well as at the APC booth at The Market at Pepper Place this Saturday.
The peanuts will be available in 16-ounce containers that sell for $8 each. To place a pre-order, go here.
For Thursby — who has previously developed boiled peanut flavors using such Alabama products as Buffalo Rock Ginger Ale, Dreamland Bar-B-Que sauce, Dale’s Steak Seasoning, Wickles Pickles, Good People Brewing Company beer and Eastaboga Bee Company honey — the Milo’s sauce peanuts are the perfect mash-up of two Birmingham institutions.
The late Milo and Bea Carlton opened the original Milo’s Hamburger Shop in Birmingham’s Norwood neighborhood in 1946, and at his shop on Morris Avenue, Thursby is continuing a Birmingham peanut tradition that began in 1907.
So, yeah, they have a lot of history – nearly 190 years combined – between them.
“We’ve been wanting to do it for a while,” Thursby says of his collaboration with Milo’s.
But it wasn’t until Mary Rose DeMouy, an event planner for the Milo’s Burger Bus, came into the Alabama Peanut Company shop a couple of months ago to buy some boiled peanuts that, as Thursby says, “the stars aligned.”
“She happened to walk in one day, and I overheard her say Milo’s and marketing, and I was like, ‘Can you get us some sauce?’” he says.
After experimenting with the recipe, Thursby hosted a taste-testing about a month ago for the Milo’s marketing team, who gave the boiled peanuts an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“Anybody that’s a fan of their sauce is going to love these,” Thursby says.
Milo Carlton, a former mess cook in the U.S. Army, developed the dark, savory Milo’s hamburger sauce soon after he and his wife opened their burger shop in 1946, and the recipe has remained a closely guarded secret ever since.
“The sauce is obviously proprietary, and only a handful of people know the formula,” Milo’s Hamburgers CEO Tom Dekle said in a 2020 interview with AL.com. “The Carltons, obviously, know what it’s about. But even today, there are only two or three of us that know what the formula is.
“It’s not only the ingredients,” Dekle added. “It’s the sequence in which the ingredients are put together. It has to have precise temperatures, and because it’s a cooked sauce, there is a cooking time at the various stages.
‘Going to need some napkins’
For Thursby, the Milo’s sauce also enhances the experience of eating boiled peanuts.
“It’s just good and messy and delicious, a classic Birmingham sauce,” he says. “You are going to need some napkins and need to be sitting down to eat them.”
Like the classic Milo’s hamburger, the peanuts are served with a couple of pickle slices and some chopped onions.
“We are doing our best to replicate the burger experience with the boiled peanuts,” Thursby says. “I was pleasantly surprised how good they were. (The sauce) really translated well into a boiled peanut.”
In addition to the boiled peanuts, beginning Nov. 15, Milo’s also will sell 16-ounce bottles of its signature sauce — as well as its Double-O and Honey Mustard sauces – for $5 each at all 22 Milo’s Hamburgers locations around Alabama and on its roaming Milo’s Burger Bus.
For every bottle sold, $2 will go to Better Basics, a local nonprofit whose mission is to eradicate poverty and increase literacy rates among Birmingham’s youth.
The sauce is also available for shipping through a partnership with the Birmingham-based food delivery company Nourish Foods. To order, go to www.miloshamburgers.com/shop. Each box will come with recipes that incorporate Milo’s famous sauce.
The sauce will be available through Dec. 31, or while supplies lasts.
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