Healthy Flavors

My wife and I are planning on having friends over for a backyard party. I plan on barbecuing some steaks, chicken pieces, and shrimp. I’d like to know more about dry rubs for barbecue. How do you use them correctly, and are they better than using a marinade? Also, should I use different dry rubs for each item? And last, can you make sure it doesn’t rain?—A long time follower and fellow cook, John S.

First things first. I don’t want to get stuck on semantics, but for your party you will be grilling some steaks, chicken pieces, and shrimp—not barbecuing them. I’m sure you already knew this, but for those who don’t: grilling is done over high heat with smaller cuts of meat, i.e. steaks, chicken pieces, etc. Barbecuing is done over very low heat (approximately 190 degrees) with larger pieces of meat, like whole briskets, for a longer period of time. As far as the weather goes, I appreciate your confidence in me, but believe it or not there are limitations to my capabilities. It’s up to you to pull off the perfect weather. By the way, the likelihood of rain diminishes if you stockpile a bunch of umbrellas.

Now let’s get to your fabulous cooking questions. It is my personal opinion that it is better to use a dry rub instead of a marinade for grilled food. Let’s break down the real purpose of each. A marinade basically has two functions. One is to tenderize a tough piece of meat, which takes place via a crucial element in any marinade—some sort of acidic liquid, like vinegar, fruit juice, wine, or even dill pickle juice. John, I’m going out on a hickory or mesquite limb here, but I’m guessing that you are planning to serve halfway decent cuts of meat for your party, and if I’m right, then there is no need for tenderizing your food. Another function of a marinade is to change the basic strong flavor of certain foods like game or oily fish—these weren’t on your menu, so I’m not sure a marinade is what you need.

Rubs have other unique grilling benefits. We all know they are crucial for preparing slow, true barbecue (which I will cover in another column), but this weekend the reason that everyone is going to want to kiss “John the Grill King” is because your rubs are going to give your steaks, chicken, and shrimp a perfect, caramelized, slightly sweet and spicy, beautifully colored crust. At the same time a rub is going to produce a great, rich flavor contrast to the interior of your meats that will explode in your guests’ mouths. Need I say more? And yes, you should use different rubs for different items—each rub can be tailored to complement the food you are cooking. I am going to share some basic steak, chicken and shrimp rubs—but feel free to add your own twist to them because that’s when you start having fun…and at the end of the grilling day, that’s what it’s all about.

The most popular grilling and barbecuing days are Fourth of July: 75 percent of US families cook out, followed by 65 percent on Memorial Day and 55 percent on Labor Day.
The average US household owns 1.2 grills and 89 million Americans own at least 1 grill. This means that there are approximately 107 million grills in our country.
There are several theories about the origin of the word “barbecue.” One that has a lot of documentation is that it is derived from the French term, barbe a queue, which means that the whole animal has been cooked “from whiskers to tail.”
Henry Ford was not only instrumental in the automobile industry, he also came up with the idea of charcoal briquettes. Being a waste not, want not kind of guy, he decided to burn the scraps left over from making the wooden parts of his cars and grind them into powder. He added a starch binder, then compressed them into small pillow-shaped pieces. Originally they were used for campfires. His buddy Thomas Edison designed the first charcoal briquette manufacturing plant.