Salt is the cheapest ingredient in almost every spice blend on a grocery shelf, which is exactly why so many of them lean on it. Push the salt up and a flat blend tastes like something. It's an easy trick, and it's also how you end up with a rub that tastes the same on chicken, fish and a rib eye.
Three of our five blends run at ten percent salt or under. Gulf Coast Blackening sits at nine. That's not a health claim, it's a flavor decision - once the salt backs off, the rest of the blend has to actually do something. Garlic has to taste like garlic. The smoked paprika has to carry weight instead of hiding behind a wall of sodium.
It also means you can be heavier-handed with the shaker than the label suggests without oversalting dinner, which matters more than it sounds like it should when you're seasoning by feel over a hot grill and not measuring anything.
The two barbecue sauces run differently, because a sauce and a rub are doing different jobs and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But on the dry blends, the rule holds: season heavy, salt light, and let the rest of the ingredient list earn its spot in the jar.
More from the kitchen
The night the bottles got names
Every formulation on the shelf started out as a number on a mason jar. Here's how five jars became five names, and why two of them almost didn't make it.
Our storyTwenty-five years of RiverKingz, one kitchen
Before there was a bottle, there was a band, a green room cooler, and two guys who couldn't agree on the setlist but never argued about the rub.
Read it. Now go cook it.
Every post ends the same way, with a fire and a bottle. Five small-batch rubs and sauces, low on salt so you can season heavy.
