A weeknight rub for the home grill.
The two-ingredient brisket rub, dressed up just enough for a backyard cook. Salt, 16-mesh pepper, three pantry spices. Mix once, jar it, season anything off the grill for six months.
- Cook time
- 2-4 hours
- Prep time
- 5 min
- Yields
- 1 cup rub (covers 4-6 lbs of meat)
What you’ll need.
- 3 tbsp kosher salt (Diamond Crystal)
- 3 tbsp 16-mesh black pepper
- 1 tbsp smoked paprika
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp onion powder
How it comes together.
Pull the salt and pepper first. Diamond Crystal kosher and 16-mesh restaurant-supply black pepper. If you only have Morton kosher, use 2 tbsp instead of 3 — Morton is denser and saltier by volume. If you only have fine-grind pepper, the rub will work but the bark won't have the same crack.
Combine everything in a glass jar with a tight lid. Shake hard for ten seconds. The mix should look mostly black, flecked with red. If it looks tan or beige, you're heavy on the spice powders — pull some out and add more salt and pepper.
Season the meat the night before if you have the time. A few hours is fine. Twenty minutes works in a pinch but the salt won't have penetrated past the surface, so the inside will eat under-seasoned. Hit the top first, then the sides, then the bottom — gravity stacks the rub on the upper face and you'll over-season the top if you start there.
Don't pat it. Don't oil it first. The salt will pull a tacky pellicle on its own within an hour, and that pellicle is what catches the smoke. Mustard slathers and oil binders are a workaround for rubs that don't stick — this one does.
Set the grill up for indirect heat. Coals on one side, meat on the other, lid down, vents adjusted to hold around 275°F. A two-zone gas grill works too — burners on one side only. The rub is built for low-and-slow, not direct flame. Searing it scorches the paprika to a bitter crust.
Cook to internal temperature, not to the clock. Chicken thighs at 175°F. Pork chops at 145°F. A whole tri-tip at 130°F for medium-rare, then rest. The rub doesn't change the doneness target — it just builds the bark.
Spritz with a 50/50 of apple cider vinegar and water once an hour if the cook runs past 90 minutes. Keeps the surface tacky, keeps the bark from drying to a brittle crust.
Rest the meat. Ten minutes for a pork chop. Thirty for a roast. The rub is finished doing its work — the rest is finishing the cook.
Mix in a glass jar and it keeps six months in a cool pantry. Half-and-half by volume of salt and pepper is the brisket version we run at every Stage Stop — no sugar, no garlic, nothing else. Full reasoning is in /blog/why-no-sugar-in-the-rub. The three pantry spices here are the home-grill compromise: paprika for color, garlic and onion for the rounder backyard read. Drop them when you trust the salt and pepper to do the work alone.
— Chef Eve Natasha
A new recipe every Monday.
The full shelf lives at /recipes — one new entry a quarter from Chef Eve, the home-cook adaptation of something we run at the pit.
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