Wednesday 6 February 2013

"Perfect Brisket" - Beef in Coca-Cola


I visited Las Vegas for a few days last September and had a wonderful time. I wasn't there for the gambling or the partying but rather spent my whole time marvelling at the sights - everything from the dolphins in the Mirage to the Bellagio fountain. The shops were also something - I wasn't interested in the designer outlets but loved the weird and wonderful stores I came across. One in particular stood out - the Coca-Cola shop.

It sold every type of Coke merchandise you could imagine, and had a cafe where you could taste different Coca-Cola Schweppes products from around the world (some of which I thought were disgusting!). I bought some cool Coke can-style drinking glasses as a gift and couldn't resist treating myself to an intriguing little cookery book - Classic Cooking with Coca-Cola. The book is written by the great-great-granddaughter of the founder of Coca-Cola and contains all kinds of sweet and savoury recipes, all using one of the company's products - so not all Coke; some use Sprite, others use Minute Maid orange juice and so on.

I decided to try a recipe that was fairly straightforward and fairly standard, as I have already made Nigella's ham in Coca-Cola before. So the one I chose was called "Perfect Brisket" - basically beef in Coca-Cola.

I had a massive piece of beef - I'd ordered a small joint from Asda costing around £4 and they substituted it with a much larger one and charged me the full price because apparently it wasn't a substitution as such, just a bigger version of something I'd ordered. I ended up with lots of leftovers!


I also ordered a packet of onion soup mix, which was one of the main ingredients in the recipe, and Asda didn't have that either (sigh). But as I had no room in my freezer for such a massive piece of beef, I decided to make the recipe anyway and adapt it as well as I could. So instead of the packet soup mix, I mixed some beef stock with some onions.


This is a very simple recipe - you combine the soup mix with a can of Coke (or 330ml equivalent from a bottle)



The final instruction is to add a bottle of chili sauce. The recipe doesn't state a quantity; I bought a small bottle of Nando's medium peri-peri sauce and added the entire contents to the sauce.



Score the beef; I added some large pieces of onion to the casserole dish as well, and pour all the liquid over the top.


Cook in a hot oven for about 3 hours until the beef is tender.


The stock gave the beef a really nice flavour though I'm not really a fan of spice, so if I made this again I would probably buy the mild version of the sauce. It made a nice change from a normal roast beef joint anyway, and I'm looking forward to trying out some more recipes from this book.

3 comments:

  1. My OH is addicted to coke and drinks far too much of it. I can't stand the stuff but I can kind of see how it would work this way. I often add a little dark brown sugar or treacle to a beef casserole and I guess the coke provides a similar flavour. Wonder if my OH would like his beef cooked in his favourite drink?

    With the extra large piece of meat, I had that problem with Tesco a few years ago. I ordered a medium sized ham joint for Christmas and they sent me a 4kg joint and charged full price for it. It lasted for ages as I froze some if after cooking but that's the perils of online food shopping!

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  2. Wow this looks good! I've made Root Beer pulled pork before which was really tasty so I imagine this would have been good too! That's annoying when Asda does substitutions, I always used to find it was the thing I needed most they would have replaced with something random!!

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  3. sounds and looks good.

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