I drink diet soda - I prefer to save my calories and sugar for real food and dessert. If you're going to cook with soda, though, you can't use the diet stuff because the sweetener will deteriorate. I bought a bottle of generic, full-sugar cola for a different recipe and decided that since I wasn't going to drink it, I might as well use up more of it by making Grilled Chicken with Cola Sauce.
I generally resist making recipes where you make your own barbecue sauce. I love barbecue sauce, and I like the barbecue sauce that I buy in the grocery store just fine. I don't see the need to put out the effort to make one from scratch unless there's something special about it. My hope was that a cola barbecue sauce would be different and delicious enough to be worth the effort.
About the recipe: you make a sauce from onion, garlic, cola, ketchup, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and chili powder. You simmer this for 15 minutes, until it reduces and thickens. You make a spice mixture from paprika, brown sugar, salt, and cumin, and rub it on chicken. I actually included the paprika and brown sugar in the sauce (oops), and just sprinkled chicken with salt and cumin. I coated the chicken with some of the sauce and used the Foreman grill to cook it.
This was okay. There was nothing wrong with this recipe, but there's nothing special about it, either. Like I said earlier, if I'm going to spend time making barbecue sauce, it should beat whatever I can buy in the store. Maybe this would be better if you used a name brand like Coca-Cola, but I doubt it. Feel free to give this recipe a try since there's nothing wrong with it, but don't expect to be impressed.
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