Rootin' for Root Beer

Slow Cooker Root Beer Barbecue Beef Sandwiches. It's quite the name, and it caught my eye in a Betty Crocker magazine last week. I was at Borders browsing the cooking magazines and thought that this recipe sounded really good. I looked it up online later and decided to put it on the menu for this week. With only three ingredients in the Crock Pot: beef, root beer, and barbecue sauce, it had to be easy! And it had great reviews on the Betty Crocker website.
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Slow Cooker Root Beer BBQ Beef

from Betty Crocker

1 boneless beef rump roast (4 lbs)

2 c barbecue sauce

1 c root beer

Salt and pepper to taste

Add beef, 1 1/2 c bbq sauce and root beer to slow cooker and cook on low for 10-12 hours. About 20 minutes before serving, pour juices into a skillet and cook on medium heat about 15 minutes until thickened and juice is reduced to about 3 cups. Meanwhile, shred beef with two forks. Add remaining bbq sauce to thickened juices and return juice to slow cooker. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve on buns. Serves 16.

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With my husband and I being the only eaters tonight, I didn't want to have 16 bbq beef sandwiches to consume for the next week. So I only bought a 2 lb roast and decided to do the recipe in half. I used KC Original BBQ sauce and Barg's Root Beer and served it with some Bush's baked beans.



Use forks to shred beef

  

Simmer juices until thickened

 

Served with baked beans



My Review (Scale 1-5)

• Preparation: 5
• So easy, literally dump it in and let it cook. The thickening process at the end was a cinch too.
• Taste: 4.5
• Meat was fall-apart tender, flavor perfectly smoky and sweet. Half a point docked because my husband would prefer a different bbq sauce.
• Cost: 5
• Beef $7.94, bbq sauce $2.00, root beer $1.00, buns $1.00. Add that all together and divide by 8 servings, comes to about $1.49 per serving!
• Clean-up: 4
• Despite the ominous ring of bbq sauce in the slow cooker, it was easy to clean. A point docked because of my excessive mess/clumsiness, which I will explain below.
• My Changes
• Next time I will try a different bbq sauce. I would have liked to have used Cookies or Famous Dave's, but apparently they don't sell that here.
• I only cooked it for 8.5 hours. Partially because it was a smaller roast, and partially because I needed it to be done at 5:30.
• Even though I had half the beef, I used the same amount of bbq sauce, and even extra root beer so that my crock pot would be half full.
• I actually forgot to add salt and pepper to taste, but I don't think I would have wanted it.
• Don't use a baster to take the liquid out, or at least figure out how to use it first. I thought this would be a brilliant idea because then I wouldn't have to handle the hot stoneware. But beware! Don't hold a baster on its side AT ALL or it will spray out all over your kitchen and slow cooker! Thus my point deduction for clean-up!
• Don't use a ladle to take the juice out of the skillet and pour it into a narrow measuring cup, or at least be more careful than I was. I wasn't too careful and, subsequently over-shot the narrow cup and spilled hot liquid on my poor thumb and the stovetop. I seem to be accident prone...
• Summary
• Great recipe overall. It is something that I would make again in the future. Enjoy!

Photographs courtesy of my husband, who is a much better photographer than myself!