Hi! I’m Tom Papoutsis. Today we’re doing chicken basics. And we’re going to start working on what’s known as a dry rub. Dry rub is very easy. You got to have a few basic ingredients that we’re going to use. Basically, some salt, we’re going to use black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, and chipotle chili pepper.

Some people, if they like a crust on their chicken or pork, ribs or whatever, don’t use a brown sugar in it. The sugar wax will caramelize and will get hard. What we’re going after today is going to be very simple.

We’re going to start out, we’re going to put some salt in a little bowl here, and there’s a reason I’m using this little bowl. But we’re going to use a little bit of salt, primarily a little bit of pepper. I’m 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’ll do a lot of chicken because you’re not going to use a whole lot of it.

As far as our garlic is concerned, I’m going to throw in, and just kind of gauge, like I said if you’ve 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 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, one that’s already mixed. Now this, as this little, granular pieces of this onion, onion’s another good flavor that we want to come through.

Now, here is the kicker, this is chipotle seasoning. It’s a chipotle chili pepper that’s ground. This rub is going to be a chipotle rub and I’m going to put enough of this in there that get 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’m going to do now is I want to kind of grind this up a little bit, so I’m going to use the flat part of this spoon, and we are going to kind of 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’ll make it really nice red. Give it a little bit more of a pepper flavor because paprika is a mild pepper, but you can see how this is kind of turning kind of a grayish color for me. It’s got a little bit of a red hue to it from the chipotle.

And at this point, what I like to do is I’ll just take my finger, just take a little bit and taste it, not bad, pretty good. It’s got a nice chipotle flavor to it. And that’s how simple a rub gets. Putting it together, very simple, very easy and next, we’re going to show you how to bake chicken.