For years I’ve been using either store bought meat rubs or creating general purpose meat rubs from the Intertubes.  Recently Rochelle and I have been getting a meat package from our local farm drop.  It contains locally raised grass fed beef and pork, chickens, etc.  For the first time I got a cut of side pork.  Basically the easiest and quickest way to explain what side pork is would be to call it uncured, unsmoked bacon.  The cut is fatty, but with a little more meat than bacon. 

To deal with the lack of curing and smoke you can do two things: cure and smoke the cut, or season and cook it.  I chose the latter.  The cut came pre-sliced, so I chose to marinade the slices for 8 hours in a mixture of 90% Apple juice and 10% Garlic infused Tabasco sauce. I decided on an oven roasting cooking method so I wanted to season each slice with a rub. 

Now, as I mentioned there’s a bazillion general purpose rub recipes out there.  Most of them are variations of black pepper, chili powder, paprika, onion powder, sugar, and salt.  I didn’t deviate too much from that basic foundation, except that I added a special ingredient that yielded a really great rub that tastes better than the general purpose ones I’ve been making for years. 

The secret ingredient?  Habanero infused cane sugar from Flavorstorm.  This created a rub with bite, but not the normal bite of cayenne pepper.  I omitted brown sugar and garlic powder (two common bbq rub ingredients) because for the amount of rub I wanted to create, I figured that I could better focus on onion as a flavor and use regular sugar so that the habanero would power through even only using a tablespoon.  I also substituted Ancho Chili powder instead of regular chili powder.  (I do this for most recipe’s that require chili powder.  I find the ancho chili powder to be a nice change of pace.  Ancho chili powder is just ground dried pablano chilies, but the powder has a slightly sweeter taste)

I hate “secret” recipes, so here you go:

1/2 cup paprika
2 tablespoons black pepper
2 tablespoons onion powder
1 tablespoon sea salt
2 tablespoons ancho chili powder
1 tablespoon habanero infused cane sugar
2 tablespoons regular cane sugar

Shake it up good in a container to mix it evenly.  It doesn’t have a strong salt component so you can be ok using a little more rub so you get that onion and that sweet ancho chili and  habanero flavor to come through.

I’ll let you know how the side pork turned out.  Enjoy!