Instructions

1. Smell the paprika before you start. It makes up more than half of this blend, so an old tin that smells of dust rather than of pepper will give you a rub that tastes of nothing but salt.
2. Tip the paprika, salt, sugar, chilli powder, garlic, onion and cayenne into the grinder together and pulse in short bursts. Long runs heat the blade, and hot sugar clumps against the sides.
3. Stop while it is still coarse enough to feel between your fingers. A rub ground to dust dissolves the moment it touches wet meat and slides off in the pan instead of forming a crust.
4. Spread it on a tray for ten minutes before jarring it. Grinding warms the blend and puts a little moisture into the air inside it, which sets solid in a sealed jar overnight.
5. Use about a tablespoon for every 450 g of meat, worked in with your fingers rather than sprinkled on. The salt needs contact to draw moisture up and dissolve into it, and that dissolved layer is what becomes a crust.
6. Give beef and poultry a night in the fridge under the rub, but hold seafood to an hour at most. Fish has nothing like the same muscle structure, and this much salt will turn it firm and dry before it ever reaches heat.
7. Keep the jar sealed in a dark cupboard. It stays safe indefinitely but the paprika colour starts fading after six months and the cayenne loses its edge, so make it in quantities you will finish in a season.