The Perfect Dry Rub Recipe

I have been challenged by no less than Dan Kenney, a founder of the Annual Beer Snob Pig Picking and the Deep Fried Turkey King, to reveal my secret dry rub recipe.  For those new to the world of barbecue, a dry rub is a mix of spices rubbed on the meat prior to cooking.  Dan threw down the challenge in his blog, Coach4aday, which I read religiously in hopes of becoming a wiser person.  No luck so far, but I’m holding steady.

Anyway, Dan, whom I respect, has raised the challenge to me and to others in the interest of transparency.  I agree that transparency is important, although there is such a thing as too much information, but we won’t go into that here.   Actually, I thought I had been a model of transparency with my Step-by-Step Illustrated Guide to Making Perfect Barbecue, available here.  Did I skip the rub issue?  Let me make amends.  Accordingly (lawyers, including recovering lawyers like me, use “accordingly” a lot; no one else does), I here disclose my dry rub recipe for pork butts and shoulders.

Salt and pepper

In the further interest of transparency, I will disclose that I often don’t bother with the salt and pepper.  The flavor of the barbecue — pork barbecue — comes from the hickory smoke and the smoke from the pork fat dripping onto the coals.  The direct heat process creates a much better bark than indirect heat, a bark with a flavor better than any spice mixture.  And I tend to think that most external spices, especially those containing sugar — turn to carbon during cooking.

Moving from barbecue to grilling, I do sometimes use spice mixtures — usually Tony Chacheres — in grilling chicken.  I only use salt and pepper on steaks.

I trust that the other cooks challenged by Dan will be equally open and transparent, and that all of you will be transparent in our daily lives — with a caveat about that too much information thing.

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