Dry rubs seem to be one of those things that us folks that cook in our backyards don't seem to find out about until after having cooked on a grill for quite a while. Maybe it's just us New Englanders that have this issue? This is a terrible state of affairs. I think this is a function of the weird double life that BBQ leads in being both ubiquitous and obscure. I do not know a single person that grew up and did not have dad cooking food outside during the summer on the grill. Most people refer to that as BBQ. Yay, we all BBQ! But then you go to a good BBQ joint and you get these weird foods and these awesome flavors and you wonder why the hell didn't Dad ever cook THIS on the grill!?!
Well, there are a lot of reasons for this. One of those is the generous use of dry rubs. I know my Dad didn't spend a lot of time reading cookbooks and there was no food TV back in the day. I know, crazy, right? If you are over 35 chances are good that your Dad didn't spend a lot of time on this sort of thing, either. In this case ignorance is not bliss! There are rare exceptions to the rule, but in the vast majority of BBQ preparations the target meat is coated with a generous portion of some sort of spice concoction. Debates abound about whether to sauce or not to sauce, but I've not ever seen anybody get into an argument about sprinkling your hunk of meat with some sort of tasty dust before cooking. It's just the way things are usually done.
You can, of course, buy rubs. There are a wide variety of them and many of them are very, very good. Try a few and see what you think. The only thing I would recommend is to steer clear of those that have salt as the first ingredient. I usually make my own. The base of every rub I make is roughly:
4 parts paprika
2 parts onion powder
2 parts garlic powder
1 part salt.
After that it is a crap shoot, depending on what I'm going to cook. The following are not hard and fast rules, but generally speaking...
pork: 1 part brown sugar, 1/2 part chili powder, 1/2 part cumin
chicken: 1 part thyme, 1 part oregano
beef: 1/2 part chili powder, grind black pepper to taste
Other things that work in rubs: rosemary, celery salt, your favorite ground chili pepper, ground mustard
You can mix and match things. If it's dry and you think it might be good and it's not mentioned above, try it. Whatever concoction you come up with, take your hunk of meat out and generously coat it with the rub. Massage it into the meat. Yeah, work it baby... mmmmm.... where was I??
Oh yeah, liberally cover the meat with your rub and then put it back in the fridge for between 1 and 24 hours. If I'm in a hurry and I didn't get things prepared I'll prepare the meat then go light the fire, giving the rub at least 20 - 30 minutes to sit on the meat before cooking. In this case longer is usually better, as the seasoning gets a chance to work into the meat and some of the juices get drawn out of the meat due to the salt. Not giving the meat enough time to rest after rubbing can sometimes result in a powdery exterior, which some people don't like so much.
You lost me at working the meat. :)
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