BBQHQThe world of cooking over fire

How do you want to cook?

Pick the way you are cooking, or go straight to a question. Every answer here carries the strength of its evidence before you open it — including the ones BBQHQ refuses.

Build your own questionNever done this before?

Start with where the fire goes

  • Direct heat

    Food directly above the fire. Fast, radiant, and the most effective way to drive the surface browning and char that make a steak taste like a steak — but the surface reaches its finish long before the centre of anything thick.

  • Indirect heat

    Food beside or above no fire at all, with the lid down so the chamber does the cooking. Slower and far more even, which is what thicker pieces usually benefit from: the centre can cook through without the outside over-browning.

  • Two-zone fire

    One fire, two areas: coals banked to one side leave a hot zone and a cool one. The single most useful setup on any cooker, because it lets you move food rather than adjust a fire that will not be hurried.

  • Smoking

    Cooking in a chamber where smoke is a deliberate ingredient rather than a by-product, with the fire well away from the food.

  • Low and slow

    Sustained low temperature for many hours, so that collagen has time to convert. Time is doing work here that temperature cannot do faster.

  • Ember cooking

    Food placed directly into or onto the embers with no grate at all. Ancient, and still the best way to cook a whole pepper or an onion.

Or build your own question

Choose a food, a cooker and a setup and BBQHQ will answer whatever that combination adds up to — including, often, that it does not know.

The chooser offers only what the catalogue contains, and narrows what it offers each time you choose something. Combinations with no evidence behind them are shown greyed out with the reason attached rather than hidden, so the shape of what is missing stays visible. It runs through the same answer engine as the questions below.

Guides

  • Your first barbecue

    Six decisions in the order they actually arrive, with what BBQHQ knows about each one and where that knowledge came from.

    Start here

  • The perfect burger

    Why a burger is not a steak, what that means for how far it has to be cooked, and where the culinary advice stops and the safety rule starts.

    Safety-critical

  • Skewers

    Threading food onto a stick changes its geometry and nothing else — which decides what skewers are good for and why mixed ones are difficult.

    Preparation

  • Marinades, and what they actually do

    Flavour, tenderising, timing and safety get asked as one question. Two of them have answers, and the handling rules are not negotiable.

    Flavour and safety

Answered (9)

Answered, thinly (5)

Sources disagree (3)

Not established (3)

Not covered (4)

What the labels above mean

Answered
More than one independent publisher covers this, and nothing in the evidence contradicts anything else.
Answered, thinly
There is an answer, but it rests on thinner evidence than it should — read the reasons before you trust the window.
Sources disagree
Sources that both look credible give incompatible figures. BBQHQ shows both rather than picking one or splitting the difference.
Not established
This is a fair question and BBQHQ does not have the evidence to answer it. The gap is recorded by name rather than filled with a guess.
Not covered
This combination is outside what BBQHQ models. Nothing here was ruled out by evidence — there simply is no guidance to apply.

Why this is a list and not a form

A form implies the space behind it is continuous — that any combination you can type is one somebody has thought about. BBQHQ holds 57 cooking profiles. A form would accept several thousand combinations and answer a couple of dozen, and every other answer would be a refusal that looks like a broken website rather than an honest limit.

So the questions are enumerated. The list is short, and its shortness is the most accurate thing on this site: it is exactly what BBQHQ has evidence for. When the evidence grows the list grows, and not before.

The open research gaps are what would have to be closed to lengthen it.

Where to go next

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