Saving You Cooking Time and Headache: Purchasing Your Meat’s Spices and Rubs

Facing the task of cooking dinner for yourself and your family after coming home from a long day of work can be overwhelming. You simply want to create a meal that is delicious, healthy, and easy to make, but everyone knows that coming up with such a meal usually isn’t very simple. How to produce mouthwatering flavors in food often is a matter of which seasonings one uses. Have you ever been puzzled about which spices should go with which meat, vegetables, and other dishes? Unneeded stress and wasted time are often the result of being stumped on how to season your food. One way to take the stress and wasted time out of your cooking is to purchase premixed spices and rubs.

When and How to Use Rubs
Premixed spices and rubs that you buy from a vender often already have the perfect blending of flavors in their mixture. You may use a rub at any time, that is to say, before, during, and/or even after cooking. If you use a rub before cooking you can cook the meat right after rubbing it or wait for the meat to marinate in the rub between 1 hour and 3 days. The longer the rub is on the meat the more the herbs and spices can penetrate the meat giving it a stronger and more flavorful taste.

What Makes a Good Rub
Remember that a dry rub is a mixture of herbs and spices, and that a good dry rub will have balanced flavors between all the different seasonings. You want to buy a rub that is balanced and will not overpower the food, but rather give it just the right flavor. The good thing about spices and rubs is that they last for months without losing their flavor. The producer of the rub should have begun making the rub with the two most basic flavors of sweet and salty. Good rubs often move beyond basic sugar and salt however, containing brown sugar, turbinado sugar, or even molasses for the sweet base and using sea salt, kosher salt, or even onion or garlic salts for the other base flavor. The truth is a basic rub with nothing more than brown sugar and garlic salt does a pretty decent job as a rub, but to cook up a gourmet meal you will want to use a rub with a base that has been added or built upon beyond these basic sweet and salty flavors. Paprika is just one spice that not only adds unique flavor but a pretty red color. Italian spices in a rub like oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary can make your food really stand out. If you want a rub that has some heat, then look for one with different kinds of pepper such as cayenne, crushed, or chili pepper. Often the package of the rub will tell you which types of food to cook the seasoning with, making your job even easier.