Santa Maria Seasoning

Developed to celebrate California’s Santa Maria style of barbecue, our Santa Maria Seasoning is bursting with flavor and ready to get to work. We wanted to retain the traditional blend of garlic, salt, and pepper; the garlic is mellow and sweet against the resinous heat from black pepper. To mimic the coastal red oak fire of a Santa Maria barbecue, we used smoked oak salt, cold smoked for hours to absorb loads of woody flavor. We blend our Santa Maria Seasoning in small batches in our facility, so we can provide our customers with the freshest and most flavorful seasonings possible.

Barbecue in Santa Maria, a beach town not quite half-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco on California’s Highway 1, came into being in the mid-1800s. Before this was wine country, it was ranch land, and occasionally the vaqueros—Mexican cowboys—that worked the ranches would hold fiestas that were open to the public. The founding of the Santa Maria Club in 1920, with its own barbecue pit in the back that fed a hungry crowd once a month, turned the barbecue into a formal institution. Making use of the clean-burning coastal live oak trees that grow readily in that region, Santa Maria barbecue chefs originally cooked top sirloin for up to 700 people each month. In the 1950s a Santa Maria butcher turned a bottom sirloin cut called the tri-tip—thin, lean, and flavorful—into the region’s preferred cut.

Tips From Our Kitchen

Our Santa Maria Seasoning is terrific on cuts of meat that will cook relatively quickly, like thinner cuts of steak. Because of the salt content we don’t recommend it for low-and-slow cooking that would require repeated applications of seasoning. It would be wonderful rubbed onto pork chops or sausage, or mixed into butter and melted onto a grilled London broil. Toss on chicken breast or fish, but this blend can be pungent so use sparingly at first, particularly on lighter meats. Add a finishing touch to hearty oven fries by tossing in Santa Maria Seasoning when they’re still hot from the oven, and bonus! The flaked salt gives great crunch. Use this blend on vegetables; serve on steamed green beans after tossing in butter, or sprinkle over the opened leaves of a steamed artichoke, and serve with lemon wedges.

Our Santa Maria Seasoning contains salt, black pepper, and garlic.

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