Brisket rub
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
Rub
- 60 g coarse black pepper, 16 mesh butcher grind, or the coarsest your grinder does rounded
- 60 g coarse salt, kosher or coarse sea salt, never fine rounded
- 10 g garlic granules, optional, and the only thing a purist would allow (optional) rounded
Method
Method
- Mix the two by weight, not by volume. Coarse salt and coarse pepper have very different densities, and equal cups is not equal grams.
- Apply heavily the night before and leave the brisket uncovered in the fridge. The salt draws moisture out, dissolves in it, and carries the seasoning back in, and the surface dries into a better bark.
Why there is nothing else in it
Fourteen hours is the constraint that writes this recipe. Every ingredient people add to a rub has a temperature at which it stops helping.
- Sugar burns at around 160°C and turns bitter long before a brisket is done. There is nowhere to hide it on a cook this long.
- Paprika and cayenne fade and go dusty over that many hours, contributing colour that the smoke provides anyway.
- Dried herbs scorch on the surface and taste like ash.
- Salt and pepper do not degrade. Pepper toasts and gets better; salt does what salt does. They are the two things that survive.
Notes
- The grind is the recipe. 16 mesh, sold as butcher grind, is the Texas standard. It is much coarser than a pepper mill produces on its widest setting. Cracking peppercorns under a pan is the home method.
- Use more than feels reasonable. A packer brisket is enormous and most of the rub ends up on parts nobody eats. An even coating you can barely see the meat through is right.
- It will not stick to a dry surface. A thin smear of yellow mustard is the traditional binder and you will not taste it.
- It keeps forever, which is the other advantage of having no sugar and no herbs in it.
Ingredient substitutions
- Coarse salt varies enormously by brand. Diamond Crystal kosher salt is much lighter per spoon than Morton or German coarse sea salt, which is exactly why this is written by weight.
- Pre-ground black pepper from a tub is too fine and usually stale. This is the one recipe where buying whole peppercorns genuinely changes the outcome.