Everything people ask us before they order

The hottest things we make at the moment are Gulf Coast Blackening and Port A Shrimp Shack, and both are seasonings you can put on a whole fillet and still finish the plate. There is no ghost pepper and no reaper anywhere in the range, and there never will be. If a rub hurts, you stop tasting it, and then what was the point.

Because a supermarket all purpose blend is 35 to 50 percent salt, which means you can only ever dust with it. Ours sits at 10. The savoury weight that the missing salt would have carried comes from tomato and mushroom powder instead. Put it on in handfuls, get a real crust, still taste the food.

We do not print one, and you should be a little suspicious of seasoning companies that do. Scoville measures a chilli, not a finished blend, and a blend that is 4 percent cayenne by weight does not carry cayenne's rating. What matters is whether you can eat a whole plate of it. Ours tops out at a medium, which is a level you can season heavily at rather than sprinkle nervously.

The two rubs that are not blackening blends, yes. RiverKingz All Purpose is garlic forward with barely any heat in it, and it is the one that ends up on chicken and potatoes on a weeknight. Gulf Coast Blackening and Port A Shrimp Shack both carry cayenne, so treat those as the grown up end of the shelf.

It means the heat comes from chillies that taste of something rather than from chillies bred for a number. Ghost pepper and Carolina reaper are the second kind, and once a blend goes past roughly 50,000 Scoville nobody is tasting the garlic any more. It is a formulation rule, not a marketing line, and it applies to everything we have in development too.

Get a cast iron pan hotter than feels sensible, near smoking. Pat the fillet completely dry, brush it with melted butter, then coat both sides heavily with a blackening seasoning. Lay it in and do not move it for two to three minutes a side depending on thickness. The black is the seasoning and the butter toasting, not the fish burning, which is why the pan has to be hot enough to do it fast. Do it outside or open a window, because it smokes.

Blackened is a cooking method and Cajun is a place. Blackening is the hot cast iron technique above, and it was popularised in New Orleans in the early 1980s, which makes it far younger than most people assume. Cajun seasoning is a broad category built on paprika, garlic, onion, black and white pepper and cayenne, and you can put it on anything. Most blackening blends are Cajun seasoning with more paprika, because paprika is what goes dark.

Cajun is country cooking from the Louisiana prairie and bayou, and it leans on pepper, onion and whatever was in the yard. Creole is city cooking from New Orleans, with more European and Caribbean influence, more herbs, more tomato and usually a bit more restraint with the cayenne. In a spice jar the practical difference is that Creole blends carry herbs like oregano, thyme and basil, and Cajun blends often do not.

Far more than feels right. A boil is seasoning a large volume of water so that it can season what is in it, and most of it goes down the drain. For a standard pot with five pounds of shrimp, start around three quarters of a cup of boil seasoning in the water along with halved lemons, onion and garlic. Taste the water before anything goes in. It should be too strong to drink.

Both, and the second one matters more than people think. Season the water at the start so the shrimp or crawfish take it on while they cook, then cut the heat and let everything soak. The soak is where the seasoning actually goes in. Fifteen to thirty minutes for crawfish, closer to ten for shrimp, because shrimp go rubbery if you leave them. Then a dusting over the top once it is on the table.

Because boiling and seasoning are two different jobs. Crawfish are cooked within a couple of minutes of the water returning to a boil, and everything after that is just making them tough. Killing the heat and letting them sit in the hot seasoned water lets the shells and the meat take the flavour on without cooking further. Drop in ice or a little cold water to stop the cook and start the soak.

Redfish has enough fat and enough backbone to take a heavy hand, which is why it is the fish blackening was made for. A paprika led blackening seasoning on the half shell, scales down on a hot grill, butter in the bowl of the fillet, is the Gulf answer. If you are baking it instead, go lighter and add lemon, because there is no sear to carry a heavy crust.

Those three are leaner and milder than redfish, so a full blackening coat will bury them. Use about half what you would on redfish, or move to an all purpose blend with lemon and garlic in it. Grouper takes a grill better than the other two. Flounder is thin enough that it wants a pan and a light hand, and it is very easy to overcook.

Dry them properly first, because wet shrimp steam instead of searing and the seasoning slides off. Toss in a little oil, then season heavily, then grill hot and fast, two minutes a side at most. Shrimp are done the moment they curl into a C. A tight O means they went too far. Skewers or a grill basket stop the small ones falling through.

It is less codified than the famous regional styles, which is part of why it is interesting. Texas is beef and black pepper and mostly refuses sauce. Memphis is pork and dry rub. Kansas City is sweet and thick. The Carolinas argue about vinegar and mustard. The Gulf sits across all of it and adds the thing none of them have, which is seafood, plus citrus, and the pepper and garlic habits of Cajun and Creole cooking.

In practice, grind and salt. A rub is usually coarser so it forms a crust over a long cook, and it is built to go on thickly. A seasoning is finer and meant to season food at the table or in the pan. Most blends can do both jobs, and the honest answer is that the labels are mostly marketing. What actually decides it is how much salt is in there and how coarse the grind is.

Yes, and on chicken and pork it is the single best thing you can do with one. Season the meat and leave it uncovered in the fridge overnight. The salt draws moisture out, dissolves into it and gets pulled back in, so the seasoning ends up inside the meat rather than sitting on it, and the dry surface browns much better. A low salt blend needs a slightly heavier hand for this than a supermarket one would.

At the end, over direct heat, for the last ten minutes. Sugar starts burning around 265F and ribs cook for hours above that, so sauce applied at the start turns to tar. Rub goes on at the beginning, sauce goes on at the finish. If you want more than one coat, do them in thin layers a few minutes apart and let each one set.

No, and plenty of good barbecue uses only one. A rub seasons the meat all the way through the cook and builds the bark. A sauce is a finish and a condiment. If you are only buying one thing, buy the rub, because it changes the meat and a sauce mostly sits on top of it.

RiverKingz All Purpose. It is garlic forward, low on salt and it goes on everything, so it is the one that earns its place fastest. Add Gulf Coast Blackening if you cook fish, Port A Shrimp Shack if you boil, and either sauce depending on whether you lean sweet or tangy.

RiverKingz All Purpose for a weeknight, used heavily and ideally the night before as a dry brine. Gulf Coast Blackening if you want a crust and you are cooking in cast iron. On the sauce side, Mobile Bay Mustard BBQ suits chicken thighs better than a sweet sauce does, because the vinegar cuts the fat.

RiverKingz All Purpose on a shoulder, applied far more heavily than you would with a salt heavy blend, then Big Muddy Mango Smoke or Mobile Bay Mustard BBQ at the end. Pork is the cut that benefits most from the low salt, because a shoulder needs a genuinely thick coat and a 40 percent salt blend will not let you do that.

RiverKingz All Purpose, and use it coarsely and heavily. Beef wants pepper and salt above all else, so this is the one cut where you may want to add extra cracked black pepper on top. Sauce on beef is a regional argument we are staying out of, but if you want one, the mustard is the better fit.

Gulf Coast Blackening for anything going in a hot pan or on the grill, Port A Shrimp Shack for anything going in water. Those two cover most of what comes out of the Gulf. Use the blackening with a lighter hand on delicate white fish than you would on redfish.

Big Muddy Mango Smoke is the sweeter one, built on mango with chipotle behind it, and it suits pork and chicken. Mobile Bay Mustard BBQ is the tangy one, built on yellow mustard and vinegar in the South Carolina tradition, and it suits pork, sausage and anything fatty enough to need cutting through.

It is everything we are making right now. We started with eight so that every one of them could be good rather than shipping a wall of jars that taste like each other. More are formulated and waiting on a production run.

Five of our six rubs have no gluten source in them at all. Turnpike Smoke's mesquite smoked salt is packed on equipment that also handles wheat, so we do not call that one gluten free. Beautiful Sunset and Cold Water are new, and their supplier gluten check has not been done yet. The two sauces are vinegar based, but Mobile Bay Mustard BBQ carries Worcestershire and that still needs checking against the supplier spec before we put a claim on a label. We will not print one we have not verified, so ask and you will get a straight answer per bottle.

No monosodium glutamate is added to anything we make. The savoury depth comes from whole ingredients that carry naturally occurring glutamates instead, which is a real distinction rather than a dodge, though it is worth knowing that naturally occurring and added glutamate are the same molecule. The full ingredient panel is on every label.

The six rubs carry very little sugar, so at the quantity anybody actually uses they contribute almost nothing. The two sauces are a different matter, because a barbecue sauce is mostly fruit or tomato and sugar by definition. If you are counting closely, read the panel rather than taking a blanket answer from us.

Keep the rubs somewhere dark, dry and not above the stove, which is the worst place in most kitchens and where nearly everyone puts them. Ground spice does not spoil so much as fade, so the question is potency rather than safety. Sauces go in the fridge once opened.

Moisture got in, and the most common way is holding the jar over a steaming pot and letting it breathe in. Season into your hand or into a bowl rather than over the pan. Low salt blends clump a little more readily than salt heavy ones because there is less salt in there acting as a drying agent, which is a real trade off of the recipe.

Yes, and it is free over forty five dollars. Everything goes out in two business days. If a bottle turns up broken, tell us and a new one is on the way the same day, no photograph of the wreckage required.

Yes. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida all ship on the same terms as everywhere else, free over forty five dollars, out the door in two business days. The coast is who this range was formulated for, so it would be a strange place not to reach.

Nothing over forty five dollars, which is roughly a four bottle order. Below that it is calculated at checkout on weight and destination. Merch and bottles ship together, so adding a tee to a sauce order does not trigger a second shipment or a second charge.