I had three soda-based barbecue sauces for my latest taste test [read Part 1 here]. I immediately threw the Dr. Pepper and 7-Up "marinades" into baggies full of meat: chicken thighs for the 7-Up, steak for the Dr. Pepper. A cursory look at the ingredients would lead you to believe there may be actual soda in this stuff: high fructose corn syrup, caramel coloring, sodium benzoate, the ingredients matched up pretty closely. I let my two bags of marinating meat stew in the fridge (the directions said at least 45 minutes). Then it was time to let loose some grilling fury.
A&W BBQ Sauce
"RICH'N HEARTY," the label assures you in its hillbilly dialect. I assume that bizarre wordplay is meant to convey a familiarity you might expect at a good ol' barbecue. Guys too Southern or drunk to keep from slurring their words together might say something like that to each other, but spelled out on a label it just looks ridiculous. As a person who writes for a living, my first thought was if their editorial oversight is any indication of their quality control, this will probably contain rat chunks.
Upon opening the bottle, I was greeted with a smell not unlike a rancid Taco Bell fart. The sauce smelled vaguely of canned tomatoes, which is an odd ingredient for a sauce in a bottle. Tasting it right out of the bottle yielded similar results: a rank, weird flavor; sort of sour, sort of sweet, all gross. I decided to grill up some burgers and bratwurst and just smear this Shakespeare on.
"Mmmm, smell that root beer smoke."
I was at my mom's because I don't have a grill of my own. What I didn't realize was that my mom's grill was actually a step down from nothing, as its only two settings are "Off" and "Towering Inferno." The juice from my brats fanned the flames into a scorching blaze. For a second I almost worried about ruining the meat, but then I remembered it was already covered in A&W BBQ Sauce.
Eventually I figured out that by cranking the heat with the grill empty, then turning the flame down to nothing when I threw the meat on the grill, I could create a rudimentary oven that would keep the fire from getting out of control while making sure that Shakespeare actually cooked. The end results were pretty good.
Pretty good, and exceedingly red.
It was time to do away with any pretense and eat these things. I threw a brat on a bun and bit down, snapping the crisp pork casing with my teeth. I fully expected to retch from this weird root beer-tinged monstrosity.
And I did retch, because I had accidentally purchased (without looking) "cheez-filled" brats, which upon my mastication shot a molten cheese load down my throat, the temperature of which can only be described as "napalm-ish." The sauce, though, wasn't horrible. In fact, it wasn't really bad at all. A light sweetness and, though it may have been psychosomatic, a hint of root beer. It actually complemented the "cheez" monstrosity lurking in my bratwurst.
It was even better on the burgers, as the sweetness was a nice counterweight to the heavier beef flavor. I finished both a burger and a brat with little regard for the monumental meatfest ahead of me, as I began tabulating the results using my patented scoring system of 1 (the worst) to 10 (the best):
Smell: 3/10
Taste (out of the bottle): 3/10
Taste (after grilling): 6/10
7-Up "Refreshing" Citrus Marinade
You could spend a lifetime poring over the annals of human history to search every written work for a word, or combination of words, to describe how incredibly Frost-ing foul this stuff smelled; you would never find an adequate phrase. It was some sort of combination of pickles, spoiled Italian dressing, and feet. And it tasted exactly like it smelled.
Suddenly that old marketing slogan made a lot more sense.
Even more worrisome were the unidentifiable "seeds" floating around and sticking to the sides of the bottle. I thought they might be fennel, but fennel wasn't listed. It was the sort of color you'd expect from swamp water, or the fluid inside a ripe boil. Naturally the chicken looked amazing in it. It was grill time.
"Flame-biled taste"
Bleh. The 7-Up marinade didn't impress anyone, and left a bizarre sour aftertaste. Which was odd, considering it barely had any taste while I chewed. It was vaguely sweet, with a slight flavor you could assume is lime. But after swallowing, the stuff turned into a horrid vinegar taste, not unlike a particularly funky crotch. "Maybe you should cook more of the sauce off," my mom suggested.
"I'm not sure the purpose of a marinade is to be cooked off."
Smell: 0/10
Taste (out of the bottle): -5/10
Taste (after grilling): 1/10
Dr. Pepper "More than Mesquite" Marinade
Finally, the sweet, spicy flavor of the oldest major soda brand in America ... combined with meat! While stewing in the bag for the recommended 45 minutes, the steak a la Dr. Pepper had an appearance best described as "abortion in a bag."
Republicans would be torn between their hatred of women's rights, and their love of red meat.
The taste of the marinade itself was, as my mom put it, "Unique. Unique, but terrible." It tasted completely artificial (what a shock!), like Monsanto run-off. The smell had hints of brown and sad, which made it seem like the perfect thing to eat. I threw it on the grill.
Sugar doesn't burn, right?
What I didn't count on was the marinade being roughly as flammable as gasoline. Almost immediately, the flames leapt up to thrash across the grill, scorching the fat and searing the meat. I have a general idea for how long to keep a steak on a grill before it's done; I'm less clear on the cook time when your method of preparation is "cast into fire." After four minutes or so, I sent in a rescue team.
This counts as "medium rare" in most American restaurants.
Once again, it was surprisingly good. It didn't taste like Dr. Pepper at all, but it had a sweet mesquite flavor, and really tenderized the meat. I much prefer simple grill marks to slathering anything in obscene amounts of sauce, but grilling off the marinade left just the sweetness behind. It's definitely not something I would eat every time I grilled, but it was a nice change of pace.
Smell: 4/10
Taste (out of the bottle): 3/10
Taste (after grilling): 7/10
The results were in, and in a narrow victory the Dr. Pepper "More Than Mesquite" Marinade was the victor! The next time you need a soda-based sauce for YOUR barbecue, reach for the Doctor.
But in the end, these sauces didn't really taste like soda at all. So what do you do when you don't want a soda-branded marinade, but the real deal? Can you cook with soda? I was about to find out.
Please continue to Part 3: Marinating with Straight Soda!
|
|
Store
49,000 
13 
124,281 
89
