The world of cooking over fire
Barbecue, grilling and smoking, worked out properly: what to cook, which cooker to cook it on, how long it really takes, and what to do when it goes wrong. Every number here comes from somewhere you can check.
Never done this before?
Six decisions in the order they actually arrive — what to buy, how to light it, where the food goes, and how to tell when it is done.
What are you cooking?
126 foods across eight categories — and not a meat site: fish, vegetables, bread, cheese and fruit all cook over fire and all have their own page.
49 foods
20 foods
35 foods
3 foods
3 foods
3 foods
9 foods
4 foods
Which barbecue?
Eleven kinds of cooker, each good at something and bad at something else. No winners, no products, and every trade-off read out of the maker’s own manual.
57 cm charcoal kettle
The one most people mean by 'a barbecue', and far more capable than its price suggests once the coals go to one side.
Bullet water smoker
The most forgiving way into long smoking: a pan of water sits between the fire and the food and steadies the temperature for you.
Three-burner hooded gas grill
Turn it on, cook, turn it off. The cooker that removes fire management from the evening entirely.
New to smoking?
It is a different job from grilling: the fire is deliberately kept away from the food, and the cook takes hours rather than minutes.
Start on what you own
A kettle will hold a low temperature for hours with the coals banked to one side. You do not need a smoker to find out whether you like smoking.
Then the forgiving one
A water smoker puts a pan of water between the fire and the food, and water cannot get hotter than boiling — so the cooker holds the ceiling for you.
Know what you are choosing
Offset, pellet, drum, electric cabinet — four ways of doing the same job, with very different demands on your afternoon.
It went wrong
Diagnosis rather than advice. Each of these separates causes that look identical on the grate, because “cook it longer” is the wrong answer most of the time.
The charcoal keeps going out
A fire that lights and then fades. Nearly always an air supply problem, and the instinctive fix — adding more fuel — often makes it worse.
Chicken skin is rubbery
Skin that is soft, pale and unpleasant to eat, on chicken that is otherwise cooked properly. Almost always a rendering problem rather than a doneness problem, which is why cooking it longer usually makes it worse.
The smoker is producing thick white smoke
Dense white or grey smoke pouring from the cooker, usually accompanied by food that tastes bitter or ashy. A combustion problem, not a wood-species problem — which is why changing wood does not fix it.
Or start somewhere else
Asado, braai, yakitori, shisa nyama — cooking cultures on their own terms, not as recipe styles.
The handful of techniques everything else is built from, with diagrams.
The UK, US, Canada and New Zealand publish different endpoints. All are right where they apply.
How much meat, when to light the fire, which cooker, what went wrong.
Why you can trust the numbers
Every figure on this site traces to a specific thing a specific source said, with the assumptions it was making. Where BBQHQ holds no evidence, the page says so rather than leaving the gap to look like an answer.
- Foods
- 126
- Kinds of cooker
- 11
- Sources read in full
- 127
- Questions we know we can’t answer
- 36
BBQHQ is organised around the questions people actually ask about cooking over fire — thousands of them, from choosing a cooker to knowing when something is done. See what we know we’re missing.