Page 69 - Barbecue Chicken Made Easy

The advantage of marinades over spice rubs is that you can get diverse flavors not typically found on a spice rack. We're talking about all the complex flavors in liquids such as wine, fruit juice, coconut milk, soft drinks, liqueurs, and more.
Since marinades don't penetrate very far into most foods, give them a hand. Gash your food. Cut slices into the surface and rough it up a bit. Give the marinade slits, cracks, and pits to enter. Gashing creates more surface area to brown and more surface area coated with flavorful baked-on marinade.
The chicken breast above was gashed in a cross-hatch pattern with a sharp knife before marinating. As you can see, the marinade has penetrated as deep as the gashes, making 1⁄2-inch cubes of flavored meat. (Gashing even works on veggies like zucchini.)
Rubs
Mild-tasting meats, like chicken, are blank canvases to be painted with herbs, spices, and flavorful liquids. We like to use a rub of aromatic herbs both on top of and occasionally under the skin to add more flavor to the skin and the surface of the meat.
Dry rubs are simply spice blends that are rubbed onto meat before cooking. Every good barbecue cook should have a signature rub to brag about. In the recipe section of this book there are a few rubs to get you started, then you can start riffing and invent your own. Once you find a rub recipe you like, make a batch and put it in a large spice shaker with a lid. If it clumps or cakes, take a tip from diner waitresses: Take some uncooked rice, place it in the oven at the lowest temperature to dry it out, and add it to the jar to absorb excess moisture.
Compared to salt, spices and herbs are huge molecules that just don’t get more than a fraction of an inch past the surface. Think of