Food companies have recently woken up to the fact that a large portion of the population is trying to develop healthier life styles, and so have been modifying their product recipes to fit in with this, removing the excess fats, salts and sugars whilst at the same time preserving the taste that made those products popular in the first place.

Or at least trying to… there’s been a couple that have let me down when they’ve released something with a new recipe, but overall the results have been pretty positive.

One of the companies re-jigging their recipe is Fountain. BBQ sauce and ketchup is a staple in our house (as I think it is with anyone with two kids under 5 – it counts as a vegetable, right?) so when they contacted me asking if I’d like to try it out I didn’t hesitate in saying yes.

The new sauces contain 70% less salt, and 50% less sugar than the previous recipes, and on top of that contains no artificial flavourings or colours – super important in our family as my eldest reacts badly to even the smallest amount of artificial additives. I’m obviously no sauce connoisseur, because I honestly couldn’t pick the difference between the old recipe and the new recipes. We even did a highly scientific test using both the old and new recipes on different halves of a snag sandwich, and neither myself nor my husbands or the boys could differentiate between the two.

I was also a little shocked to discover on doing some research that our previous preferred brand of ketchup had almost twice as much sugar, and more than four times the amount of salt than the new Fountain recipe. Ouch.

Of course, the final test doesn’t come until I’ve made up the family’s favourite beef recipe – one of the few meals all four of us actually agree on, my slow cooked BBQ beef.

Nomnomnom! Just to give you prior warning, this is super slow cooked, like over 7-8 hours, I know it sounds like a lot of effort, but it’s totally worth it as the beef just melts in your mouth.

You Will Need

• A hunk of beef. I like the salt reduced corned beef that you can get now as it always seems to come out more tender than the regular beef rumps.
• 1 Cup of Fountain BBQ Sauce
• 1/2 Cup of Fountain Tomato Sauce
• 1 sachet of onion soup
• 1 Tsp of sweet paprika
• 2tsp of Italian herb mix
• 2 small onions or one big one

1. Cut any excess fat away from your beef (or buy the lean version and save yourself the trouble) don’t throw this away, wrap it up and keep it in the fridge.

2. Fill up a big pan with water and soak your meat. It sucks up all the water and makes it even more tender. I like to do it for a minimum of two hours, but I’ve left soaking (in a covered saucepan in the fridge) over night before and it’s been just as good. If you’re using corned beef throw a couple of potatoes into the pot as well as this helps suck out any excess salt so you don’t feel like you’re dying from a sodium overdose!

3. Add your ketchup and BBQ sauce to a jug – we’re big fans of BBQ in my house, so there’s slightly more BBQ in my mix than tomato, but play around with the ratios and see what suits your family best. Add in your paprika, herbs and onion soup mix. If you like a bit of a kick it’s nice to add some sweet chili sauce and just a bit of chili powder at this stage – but as I’m the only one in my family who likes spice I don’t get to do that very often!

4. Chop your onions roughly and place them on the base of a baking dish, then chuck your beef on top, I normally have to cut mine in half to fit it in. Pour the sauce over it and get your hands in there to spin it around and make sure it’s thoroughly covered. Find the fat you cut off earlier and place it on top – this means the flavour of the fat will cook into the sauce, but you can remove it once it’s cooked and don’t end up with any large fatty chunks hidden in your beef.

5. Crank your oven up to 140 degrees C. Cover loosely with foil and place onto an old baking sheet to catch any drips or over flow as it cooks (serious on this one, BBQ sauce is a PITA to clean off the bottom of your oven, learn from my fail!). I like to cook it for a total of 7-8 hours, but it’s not a case of just leaving it alone I’m afraid!

• You can ignore it until half way through the cooking time when you take off the foil – this is the stage when I pull out the fat and throw it away as well.
• Once the foil is removed, about every 45 minutes go back into the oven and flip the meat over to make sure any bits sticking out from the sauce doesn’t dry out.

7. About an hour before you’re ready to serve, pull the meat out from the oven and slice it thinly. Put it back into the baking dish, making sure to cover it all with sauce. Put it back into the oven with the temperature up to 160 degrees C. After half an hour give it all a stir, again, to make sure there are no dry bits. This final step really soaks the flavour into all of the meat.

8. And serve! I pull the meat out and then separate the sauce into a gravy jug as everyone in my family likes a different amount of sauce. In summer my favourite way to eat this is with crusty rolls, lots of butter and a big salad. In winter it’s lovely with some baked potatoes and a few veg – particularly corn on the cob. The only downside to the whole meal is that you have this awesome smell floating through your house for eight hours before you get to dig in and eat!

Tip for the left overs – I like to mix a tin of tomatoes and kidney beans in with them and stretch them out to another meal by serving with rice and plenty of sour cream.

(Disclaimer: Fountain provided me with a few bottles of sauce to try out and a sweet BBQ set with no caveat to write about the new formula for their sauces. All of the opinions here are my own, and I was genuinely really very impressed with how good the new recipe tastes and it definitely held up in my slow cooked beef! It’s also worth saying that this recipe normally gives my husband heart burn, but this time around he didn’t have any, whether that’s to do with the lower salt sauces used, I don’t know, but it’s interesting to note!)