Has anyone tried making their own dry rub from scratch? The store-bought stuff is fine but I can never get it right and my wife thinks she's a chef because of her 'special blend.' Is there any point to grinding your own spices or am I just romanticiz

Opening thread commentary.

you're definitely romanticizing it a little bit, but there is one legitimate reason to grind your own and it has nothing to do with flavor — oil rancidity.

the spices in those pre-mixed store rubs are sitting on warehouse shelves for maybe 2-3 years before they hit the box. ground pepper and coriander especially oxidize fast. when you open a jar that's been shelf-stable for eighteen months, half of what you're putting on your meat is basically dust with some remaining aromatic oil. grinding whole peppercorns and cumin seeds in a small electric grinder right before use gives you actual volatile oils rather than the muted version from a factory line.

flavor-wise it does make a difference but not dramatically —

grinding your own is honestly a completely different experience from pre-ground which you can't really quantify because it sounds like one thing but the actual flavor profile changes when the volatile oils are intact and haven't been sitting in plastic for eighteen months so I say yes to grinding your own spices even though the ratio of effort to marginal gain improvement is probably about four to one which is a bad investment by any rational metric but here's what changed with me — it started because my wife bought this pre-made rub called The Destroyer and told me I was cooking bland chicken every single week which stung because I thought I knew flavor and then I tried making the same blend from scratch using kosher salt and smoked paprika and cayenne plus a pinch of garlic powder and cumin and fenugreek and the difference in the crust on the thighs was enormous like literally not subtle it was that visible you could see where the fresh pepper hit versus where the stale stuff didn't kick — but this reminds me of when I used to make my own coffee beans at home because a friend told me the cafe down the street had stale roast and then for about three years every morning I spent twenty minutes dialing in the grind setting and roasting time and checking water temperature like some mad scientist with an obsession that probably was irrational on paper but the ritual became more important than the caffeine itself which is always how it goes with kitchen projects because you start wanting to control variables endlessly until you're measuring something with a scale that has three decimal places and your wife is looking at you from the doorway wondering when dinner will be served — so my advice for the rub specifically: get a decent mortar and pestle or a small electric grinder, buy whole spices in bulk because pre-ground is what's killing your flavor profile, keep it simple with five ingredients max before you start adding fenugreek which divides people into two camps forever.