I've over-salted ribs before. Whole rack, ruined, ate it anyway because I'm stubborn and it was a four-hour cook and I wasn't about to start over. So when MSN surfaced a piece on how Aaron Franklin seasons a rack, I paid attention.

The part most people skip past: the seasoning itself is only half the story, and how you get it onto the ribs matters just as much. Franklin built his reputation on simple food done with obsessive care, and seasoning is no exception. The blend matters less than the application. Get the sprinkle wrong and it doesn't matter what's in the jar.

Since the article doesn't walk through his exact hand position, I'll tell you what works for me, built around that same idea. I hold my hand high above the rack, maybe a foot or so, and let the seasoning fall like snow. From up there the coverage spreads out evenly and I can see bare spots and heavy spots as they happen. Get your hand low and close and you get seasoning clusters, salty little islands, and no amount of wishing fixes that once it's on.

And I don't dump and rub. The sprinkle happens from height in a slow, even pass, and if a spot needs more, I add more in another light pass rather than pressing a big handful into the meat. You can always add. You cannot take it off. My ruined rack from a few years back is proof of that particular law of physics.

Distance also buys you perspective. Standing close, you can't actually see the whole rack's coverage. Step back, lift your hand, and suddenly the patchiness is obvious. Same reason painters hold a canvas at arm's length. Barbecue is one of those things where a small mechanical habit matters more than any secret ingredient, and I'd bet that's exactly the territory Franklin is operating in when he seasons a rack.

One more thing from my own cooks: I get better results sprinkling straight down rather than at a slant. Feels like an angled pass lands patchier to my eye. That's just me, though, and my eye has been wrong plenty of times.

I've eaten enough barbecue in enough tiny parking lots to know that the pitmasters who seem casual about everything are usually fanatics about two or three tiny things. Whatever Franklin's exact version looks like, the principle is the takeaway. Next time I run a rack (I'm doing a weekend cook soon, timing it around my Houston trip), I'm testing the from-height sprinkle side by side with my old low-hand method, and I fully expect to be annoyed at how much better the high-hand rack looks.

If you try it, tell me if your hand instinctively drops anyway. Mine did. Thirty years of low sprinkling is a hard habit to break.