How to Make a Basic Chicken Rub

Tom Papoutsis: Hi, I am Tom Papoutsis. Today we are doing chicken basics and we are going to start working on what's known as the the dry rub. Dry rub is very easy. You are going to have a few basic ingredients that we are going to use. Basically some salt, we are going to use black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and Chipotle chili pepper. Some people, if they like a cross on their chicken or pork or ribs or whatever, they will use a brown sugar in it. The sugar will actually caramelize and will get hard.

What we are going after today is going to be very simple. We are going to start out, we are going to put some salt in a little bowl here and there is a reason I am using this little bowl, but we are going to use a little bit of salt, primarily, a little bit of pepper. I am going to actually use enough pepper to give us some good flavor, mix that around. Now this is going to make a lot of rub. It looks like a lot of salt and a lot of pepper, it is, but it will do a lot of chicken because you are not going to use a whole lot of it. As far as our garlic is concerned, I am going to throw in and just gauge, like I said, if you have seen some of my videos, you know I don't measure a whole lot. I just kind of gauge it on how much flavor I want. I will use enough garlic there to give it a good garlic flavor. If you don't want to use garlic and salt just use a garlic salt, the one that's already mixed. Now this has these little, granule pieces of this onion. Onions, another good flavor that's going to -- we want to come through.

Now here is the kicker. This is Chipotle seasoning. It's a Chipotle chili pepper that's ground. So we are going to use -- this rub is going to be a Chipotle rub and I am going to put enough of this in there that and give it to break loose here for me. There we go. It's going to give it a nice, red color, deep red color and what I am going to do now is we are going to take and I want to grind this up a little bit. So I am going to use the flat part of the spoon and we are going to mix it up and just mix all these ingredients together.

Now if you want this to be a little bit more red in color then get in there, get in the spice cabinet, pull out your paprika and put some paprika in here and that will make it really, really nice really, give it a little bit more of a pepper flavor because paprika is a mild pepper, but you can see how this is turning kind of a grayish color form. It's got a little bit of red hue to it from the Chipotle and at this point what I like to do is I will just take my finger. Just take a little bit, taste it. Not bad, pretty good, pretty good. It has got a nice -- oh, wow! Nice Chipotle flavor to it and that's how simple the rub gets. Putting it together, very simple, very easy and next, we are going to show you how to bake chicken.