Five great ingredients come together to create one superfine flavor!
Looking for an easy and excellent way to perk up your pork chops this summer? Considering ways to make your fresh seafood even more appealing? Want to take your roast chicken to the next level or spice up some local summer potatoes? Spicy Coffee Spice Rub could be the answer!
If you don’t yet know the Spicy Coffee Spice Rub, it was developed at the Roadhouse many years ago, back when Alex Young was the chef. It’s a mix of ground Roadhouse Joe coffee beans, along with a good dose of Urfa red pepper from Turkey, Portuguese sea salt, Telicherry black pepper from India, and some ground cloves. The aroma is amazing—every single person (literally) that I’ve opened a jar for and given a smell to has responded with a very serious “Wow!”
The idea for the spice blend’s creation stemmed from conversations with journalist and friend Francine Maroukian, centered around developing a spice rub for Thanksgiving turkey. It worked! Every year for the autumn holidays, the Roadhouse does some terrific smoked turkeys that are taken to the next level with Spicy Coffee Spice Rub. It’s also really amazingly excellent on fresh fish, shrimp, potatoes, and the fresh squash that’s starting to show up at the farmers markets in abundance right now.
It’s great too on steamed potatoes that have been dressed first with a little olive oil. When the potatoes are done, just break ’em open while they’re hot and smash ’em (broken side down) into the bowl with the oil/rub mixture. The potato seems to just naturally absorb, highlight, and accent the spiciness of the rub. It’s got one of those finishes that’s so great I don’t want to eat anything else afterward. Alternatively, you could crush the spiced potatoes and then fry them in hot olive oil in the spirit of the wonderful Smashed Potatoes that Ji Hye and the Miss Kim crew have made so popular over the years!
I used the Spicy Coffee Spicy Rub the other night on a piece of catfish. It was an excellent and exceedingly easy meal. To recreate it yourself, just dice some Benton’s Tennessee bacon or Broadbent’s Kentucky country bacon and pan-fried it ’til crisp, then pull it out of the pan. Sprinkle the spice rub very liberally on the catfish filet and then toss the fish into the pan to cook in the bacon fat. Serve it up with, maybe, some mustard greens and local potatoes.
This week the Roadhouse is running a special burger—dry aged, freshly ground, and hand-pattied, then generously coated with the Spicy Coffee Spice Rub and grilled to order over whole oak logs. The burger is topped with a local squash slaw and some of the Bellwether Ricotta that I mentioned above, seasoned with fresh herbs, and served, of course, on a toasted Bakehouse Brioche bun!
