Rubs, and dry brining, and Steph’s Packed Lunch…

Hola Fire Friends…

What a scorcher!! I know you won’t all feel the same but I have been LOVING the heat the last week or so. Not only do I get to cook outside, but we get to eat outside too. A perfect combination for this sun-loving girl.

Long. Live. Summer.

Gonna get straight to the point today (which is Tuesday evening), not least because I have a very early start, and a long, long day. Involving a 7 1/2 hour round train trip to Leeds to spend less than 10 minutes on the telly-box. But, still very exciting. Steph’s Packed Lunch have asked me to go on to give a very quick BBQ Masterclass, and I’m cooking a couple of super easy recipes that the kids could get involved in making on Fathers Day… If you happen to be at home watching the box today lunchtime (that’s Wednesday, yes, about 12.10 I think).

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Ask Me a Question comes from Graham…

Since doing your Kamado masterclass I am totally sold on dry brining and do it on everything that it can apply to. However, if you intend on putting a rub on the meat as well that has salt in, would you dry brine (24 hrs or so) then rub just before the cook, or anticipate there's enough salt in the rub to do its magic and put the rub on the for the dry brine period?

I promised Graham I’d answer him today, so here goes:

If I am going to be using a rub on my meat I would invariably put it on with the salt when I am dry brining. Kind of a two for the price of one situation. So although the spices in the rub wouldn’t penetrate into the meat in the way that the salt would it would save me a job the next day. Most spice molecules are too big to get very far into the meat - no more than 3-4mm, unlike salt that can go ALL the way give enough.

Need a quick recap on dry brining? Here’s what I wrote in SEARED:

Brining is the number one trick to boost meat tenderness

Salt is amazing: a little water-soluble molecule (sodium chloride or NaCl if you’re a bit of a science nerd like me) that has the ability to amplify the flavour of everything. Salt makes things taste better, taste of more – your roast pork more porky, your ribeye steak more beefy or your curry more deliciously spicy – but it also has rather more miraculous properties than just enhancing taste. 

All meat benefits from the application of salt to increase juiciness and I have got into the habit of salting, or brining, all my meat before I cook it, regardless of the cut or species. You can dry-brine – that is just sprinkle with salt – or you can wet-brine by soaking it in a salty solution. I invariably go for a dry brine; it’s quicker, takes up less room in the fridge and uses far less salt. A wet brine adds extra water to meat, whereas dry-brining stops the water that’s already there from escaping, so you could argue that wet-brining has a somewhat ‘diluting’ effect to the meat’s own flavour.

With dry-brining, when you sprinkle salt over meat it quickly draws out a little water from the muscle cells, creating a really concentrated salty brine on the surface. Over time this salty brine soaks back into the meat by the process of diffusion. Nature always wants to seek equilibrium – so the more salty outside diffuses into the less salty inside, doing its darnedest to make things equal. 

When you salt meat, it physically breaks the bonds that hold the muscle cells together in a tight bundle. Back to the spaghetti analogy, over time the tight bundle becomes a much looser bundle. By disrupting the bonds between muscle fibres they cannot physically contract up as much once that meat hits the heat, so less of the water inside gets squeezed out. The result? Juicer meat with the flavour ramped up to the max.

So, brining literally is the best thing you can do to your meat. All meat. 

The rule of thumb is 1 tbsp flaked sea salt, like maldon, per kilo of meat. But if you are using a ready made rub, it will contain its own salt to a lesser of greater extent. Which makes things a touch tricky. Of course, most rubs won’t tell you how much salt they contain as a percentage so you kind of need to guess. I can’t give you a hard and fast rule here I’m afraid. I would take a tiny taste of your rub before you use it, is it overwhelming salty, or mildly salty? If it’s the former, maybe reduce the salt you brine with by half-ish, or maybe by less if its not that salty. But I would definitely do both at the same time, as you still won’t have any more clue on that guesswork if you do it separately, will you? And if you don’t reduce the salt in the dry brine, then add the rub it could end up too salty.

The better option, obviously, would be to make your own rub so you have complete control of the levels of salt, and the other things, the chilli, the sugars, the fragrant spices. This is what I do, I almost never buy ‘rubs’. If you can, buy whole unground spices - you can get bigger bags now even in the supermarkets - and toast and grind yourself. If it kind of feels like a faff, now that the more you do it the more it becomes just a normal habit. Something you’d not think of not doing, like washing your hands before cooking. She said, rather school marm-ish-ly (sic, obvs), I apologise.

Throughout SEARED there are loads of rub/marinade recipes that you could in effect pinch and use on all sorts of meat, you can see my brisket and pulled pork above, along with some smoked gammon hock. By the way, I would loosely define a rub as dry spices, and a marinade as a mix where there was some sort of liquid involved to make more of a paste. Here’s a few of my personal favourites:

Dalmation Rub - the classic for Texas Brisket. Just salt and ground pepper, in pretty much equal quantities (as always, personal preference). A 1 tbsp salt per kg, then the same of crushed peppercorns

Black pepper and fenugreek rub - what I actually put of my brisket. For a 4kg brisket, 2 tbsp fenugreek seeds, ground, 3 good tbsp black peppercorns, crushed, 4 tbsp Maldon and 4 tbsp dark brown sugar - mixed and rubbed

Cumin and smoked paprika - for a 3.5kg pork shoulder I use: 2 tbsp cumin seeds, toasted and crushed, 75g dark brown sugar, 3 good tbsp Maldon, 2 tbsp English mustard powder, 1 good tbsp paprika. I would add 4 tbsp crushed garlic and mix to a paste with olive oil - so it becomes a paste…

Fennel and smoked paprika - as above but sub in fennel in stead of cumin. Fennel is amazing with pork.

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That’s it for today, hope helpful. Questions and comments below!

Lastly can I say a million thank you’s to all of you who gave me some reviews. It was lovely and so helpful.

Autumn Fire school dates will be announce here in a couple of weeks, so watch this space. And if you’re a paid subscriber, will be announcing details of a live cook-a-long with myself next week. What shall we cook?

Thanks Team Fire.

Big love

GT

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