In Part 1 and Part 2 of my Soda Sauce Taste Test, I had declared Dr. Pepper "More Than Mesquite" Marinade the best soda-based barbecue sauce you could find, but what about soda itself?
All marinades consist of three basic ingredients: an acid, an oil, and seasoning. If "caramel coloring" and sugar counted as seasonings, I was two thirds of the way there. I brought out my ringer.
Does a body good. And fat.
Wild Cherry Pepsi is the drink of summer for true soda enthusiasts. Coca-Cola is too malty and heavy, and is more of a winter soft drink (hence that interminable polar bear marketing machine). Don't go for that "Cherry Vanilla" bullShakespeare, either. Vanilla is so expensive it would never be mass-produced for sodas, and the chemical cocktail they use in lieu of it tastes like cancer. I marinated an old Midwestern standard, the pork steak, for 45 minutes using nothing but the sweet high-fructose nectar of the (diabetic) gods.
I also threw a nail in, to see if it really would dissolve.
With no real idea how this would turn out, I threw the pork steak on the grill.
"Lookin' good!"
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-"
The fire was drawn to my soda-slathered pork steak, immediately engulfing it in a sugary blaze usually reserved for small fleeing children in Vietnam. My tongs were too short to even reach through the fire and turn the steak over. After a couple of minutes I shut off the gas to the grill and let the fire burn itself out, resigned to my final taste test being a small chunk of coal.
And my guess wasn't that far off.
Once I was able to find a few non-singed pieces, I tried a bite. It was possibly the most tender steak I had ever tasted (aside from the crumbly black bits). It even had a barely-there sweetness to it.
Aside from that though, it was completely devoid of flavor. After the overload of saucy flavors, this one was like chewing tender, fatty air. Even the flavor of the pork was hard to detect. My theory? Soda bubbles had worked to dissolve and leach all flavor out of the meat, much like it does to the calcium in your bones. So it wasn't necessarily bad, but it definitely wasn't good, either.
Smell: 2/10
Taste (out of the bottle): 10/10
Taste (after grilling): 0/10
So it might not have all the components of a marinade, but soda could at least be your acid if you were so inclined. Just be sure to have a fire extinguisher handy.
Randall Cleveland is a comedy writer based in St. Louis and Los Angeles. You can follow his pointless exploits at RandallCleveland.com.
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