Foods & cuts
Everything BBQHQ has worked out how to cook — fish and vegetables and bread as well as meat. Each one has a page saying how long it takes, how to tell when it is ready, and what the rules are where you live.
What kind of evening is it?
Six ways in, each a question rather than a category. A food can be in more than one of them — a pork shoulder is both a weekend cook and the answer to feeding twelve people — because that is how anybody actually thinks about dinner.
Quick, but there is a number to hit (11)
Burgers, sausages, chicken pieces, kebabs — fast food over a hot fire where the whole difficulty is a temperature you cannot see. Mincing, dicing and skewering all take what was on the surface and put it through the middle, so these are the ones where an instrument beats a judgement and colour tells you nothing.
Beef burger
The same animal as a steak and a completely different safety proposition. Mincing takes bacteria that lived on the surface and distributes them through the interior, so the whole mass has to reach the endpoint.
Lamb burger
Minced lamb, and therefore subject to exactly the same form rule as a beef burger: the interior is no longer sterile, so the whole mass has to reach the endpoint.
Sausage
Seasoned minced meat in a casing, and the most-cooked thing on a British barbecue by a distance. Usually pork, frequently not — beef, lamb and mixed sausages are all ordinary — so the species on this record is the common case rather than a definition.
Quick, and judged by eye (40)
Steaks, chops, fillets, prawns, halloumi. Hot fire, food over it, done before the drinks run out — and read by how it looks, feels and lifts off the bars rather than by a probe. Getting one of these wrong costs you a dinner and nothing worse, which is a genuinely different kind of cooking from the collection above it.
Chicken thigh, bone-in
The most forgiving piece of chicken and the one where the safety endpoint and the good endpoint point in the same direction — thighs improve past the temperature at which they become safe.
Chicken thigh, boneless
A thigh with the bone out and usually the skin off, which turns an irregular lump into a flat slab and roughly quarters the cooking time. Treated as a separate food precisely because the sources time it separately.
Chicken breast, boneless
Lean breast meat with no bone and no skin, and the least forgiving thing on this list: it has no fat to buy time with and its safety endpoint is above the point at which it starts drying out.
Needs the afternoon (22)
Whole birds, joints and big muscles. The fire goes beside the food rather than under it, and the hours are doing work heat cannot do faster — connective tissue is indifferent to how impatient you are.
Whole chicken
A whole bird is two different foods on one carcass: lean breast that dries out past its endpoint, and working thigh meat that is better well beyond it. Cooking it well is largely about managing that conflict.
Picanha, whole
The rump cap cooked whole, on its fat. The cut readers ask about most across butchery systems, and the one where BBQHQ's own cautious answer turned out to be wrong.
Pork shoulder
A cut that passes its safety endpoint hours before it is ready, which makes it the clearest demonstration that safety and texture are different questions.
Vegetables over fire (38)
Not a side dish and not a concession. Fire does something to a vegetable an oven cannot, catching the sugars before the middle gives way — and the ways it goes wrong are its own: watery rather than dry, welded to the bars rather than burnt.
Whole sweet pepper
Cooked over embers until the skin blisters and lifts. A good illustration that doneness is not always a temperature, and that 'done' can be a purely visual condition.
Corn on the cob
The only vegetable in the catalogue with a retrieved timing, and it turned out to have a variable nobody looks for: the husk roughly doubles the time and changes the mechanism from grilling to steaming.
Aubergine slices
Cut into slices about a centimetre and a half thick and grilled over medium-high heat, roughly five minutes a side. The one vegetable where the flesh is structurally a sponge.
Fish and shellfish (20)
The shortest cooking times in the catalogue and the smallest margin for error, where the useful signals are cues rather than numbers — the UK regulator publishes no temperature for fish at all, and says the flesh should turn opaque and separate easily with a fork.
Salmon fillet
A fatty fish with delicate muscle structure, which fails in the opposite direction from meat: it falls apart rather than toughening.
Whole trout
A whole round fish, gutted, cooked over direct heat until the flesh is opaque and lifts from the bone. The skin is structural — it is what holds the fish together on a grate.
Tuna steak
A dense steak of dark muscle, very commonly served rare in the middle — which puts the culinary endpoint and the safety endpoint further apart than for any other fish.
Beyond meat (19)
Halloumi, tofu, flatbread, whole fruit. Everything here shares one problem — none of it renders fat onto the bars to stop itself sticking — and one considerable advantage, which is that none of it has a safety endpoint to hit.
Halloumi
A high-melting-point cheese that holds its shape over direct heat. Included specifically because it may have no food-safety cooking endpoint at all — a case worth stating plainly rather than pretending to know.
Paneer
A fresh cheese that browns without melting, cooked in slabs or on skewers. It behaves like halloumi and is not halloumi.
Frying cheese
A Latin American cheese sold and named for cooking over heat. It holds its shape for the same structural reason halloumi and paneer do.
Foods with a window behind them (48)
The ones where BBQHQ holds a reconciled cooking time — a range, the publishers it came from, and what was assumed to combine them. Just under half the catalogue, and the half where the site can answer the question people actually type.
Whole chicken
A whole bird is two different foods on one carcass: lean breast that dries out past its endpoint, and working thigh meat that is better well beyond it. Cooking it well is largely about managing that conflict.
Chicken thigh, bone-in
The most forgiving piece of chicken and the one where the safety endpoint and the good endpoint point in the same direction — thighs improve past the temperature at which they become safe.
Chicken thigh, boneless
A thigh with the bone out and usually the skin off, which turns an irregular lump into a flat slab and roughly quarters the cooking time. Treated as a separate food precisely because the sources time it separately.
Described, but not timed (78)
The other half, and they are not filler. Each one carries what it is, what shape it is, what that shape does over fire and how it fails — everything except a duration, because no publisher BBQHQ holds has stated one. Reading a time across from the nearest similar food would have been easy and would have been fiction, so these pages say what is unknown and name the gap that would close it.
Beef short ribs
Heavily worked rib meat with a great deal of collagen, and the cut whose NAME is least reliable: plate ribs, chuck ribs and thin flanken strips are all sold as short ribs and cook completely differently.
King prawns in the shell
Prawns grilled in their shells, which insulate the flesh and hold moisture in. The FSA's cue is firm and opaque flesh rather than a temperature.
Peeled king prawns
Peeled prawns, usually skewered so they can be turned together. Faster than shell-on and far less forgiving.
Cooking for a crowd (18)
Big cuts that feed a lot of people off one piece and forgive being held hot afterwards, which is the property that actually matters when twelve people arrive at seven. The party planner will do the arithmetic wherever somebody has published a portion figure, and refuse where nobody has.
Whole chicken
A whole bird is two different foods on one carcass: lean breast that dries out past its endpoint, and working thigh meat that is better well beyond it. Cooking it well is largely about managing that conflict.
Picanha, whole
The rump cap cooked whole, on its fat. The cut readers ask about most across butchery systems, and the one where BBQHQ's own cautious answer turned out to be wrong.
Pork shoulder
A cut that passes its safety endpoint hours before it is ready, which makes it the clearest demonstration that safety and texture are different questions.
What this catalogue is, and what it is not
It is organised by form rather than by animal, and that is the one idea worth carrying away from this page. A minced patty and a whole muscle off the same cow are cooked to different temperatures by every food-safety authority BBQHQ holds, because mincing moves surface bacteria into the middle. Species tells you what it tastes like; form tells you whether you can serve it pink. That is why the column is there.
It is honest about the half it cannot time. Around half of these foods have a cooking window with named publishers behind it, and the rest have everything except the window — the shape, the structure, how the heat travels through it, which part burns first, and an explicit note saying nobody BBQHQ holds has published a duration. Both halves are here on the same footing rather than one being hidden, because “we do not know” is an answer and guessing is not.
It is not a recipe collection. There are no ingredient lists, no marinades that were not documented by somebody, no serving suggestions. What every page has instead is what a named source established, who they were, and what they left out — which is a smaller promise than most food sites make and one that can actually be kept.
Everything, by what it is
The complete catalogue, and the reason it is a table rather than more cards. Form is printed beside every food because form — not species — governs the safety endpoint. A minced patty and a whole muscle from the same animal are cooked to different temperatures, and seeing those two words in one column on one animal is the fastest way to convey the single most important idea in this catalogue.
Meat & poultry (49)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole chicken | Whole bird | 1.4–2.2 kg | Not a cut |
| Chicken thigh, bone-in | Bird portion | 115–225 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken thigh, boneless | Bird portion | 100–140 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken breast, boneless | Bird portion | 115–225 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken breast, bone-in | Bird portion | 170–340 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken wings | Bird portion | 55–85 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken drumsticks | Bird portion | 100–140 g | Not a cut |
| Beef burger | Burger pattyInterior contamination risk — cook through | 110–200 g | Not a cut |
| Rib eye steak | Steak | 250–400 g | Rib eye |
| Sirloin steak | Steak | 200–350 g | Sirloin steak |
| Picanha, whole | Whole muscle | 1.0–1.5 kg | Picanha |
| Pork chop | Chop | 180–300 g | Pork loin chop |
| Pork shoulder | Bone-in joint | 2.0–4.0 kg | Pork shoulder |
| Pork spareribs | Bone-in joint | 1.1–1.6 kg | Spareribs |
| Baby back ribs | Bone-in joint | 0.7–0.9 kg | Loin back ribs |
| Pork tenderloin | Whole muscle | 350–600 g | Pork tenderloin |
| Brisket | Whole muscle | 4.0–7.0 kg | Packer brisket |
| Beef short ribs | Bone-in joint | 1.5–4.0 kg | Beef short ribs |
| Lamb leg steak | Steak | 150–250 g | Lamb leg steak |
| Lamb loin chop | Chop | 90–150 g | Lamb loin chop |
| Lamb burger | Burger pattyInterior contamination risk — cook through | 110–180 g | Not a cut |
| Sausage | SausageInterior contamination risk — cook through | 50–90 g | Not a cut |
| Pork belly slices | Whole muscle | 150–300 g | Pork belly |
| Lamb kebab pieces | Kebab piecesInterior contamination risk — cook through | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken kebab pieces | Kebab piecesInterior contamination risk — cook through | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Beef kebab pieces | Kebab piecesInterior contamination risk — cook through | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Pork kebab pieces | Kebab piecesInterior contamination risk — cook through | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Lamb kofta | MincedInterior contamination risk — cook through | 80–140 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken satay strips | Kebab piecesInterior contamination risk — cook through | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
| Rump steak | Steak | 200–350 g | Rump steak |
| Bavette steak | Steak | 400–800 g | Bavette |
| Fillet steak | Steak | 180–280 g | Fillet steak |
| T-bone steak | Steak | 400–900 g | T-bone steak |
| Pork shoulder steak | Steak | 180–300 g | Pork shoulder |
| Gammon steak | Steak | 150–250 g | Gammon steak |
| Pork loin joint | Boneless joint | 1200–2500 g | Not a cut |
| Butterflied leg of lamb | Boneless joint | 1500–2500 g | Leg of lamb |
| Rack of lamb | Bone-in joint | 500–900 g | Rack of lamb |
| Lamb shoulder | Bone-in joint | 1800–2600 g | Lamb shoulder |
| Duck breast | Bird portion | 180–350 g | Not a cut |
| Poussin | Whole bird | 400–600 g | Not a cut |
| Whole turkey | Whole bird | 4000–7000 g | Not a cut |
| Turkey breast joint | Boneless joint | 1000–2500 g | Not a cut |
| Chicken leg quarter | Bird portion | 250–400 g | Not a cut |
| Duck leg | Bird portion | 180–300 g | Not a cut |
| Whole duck | Whole bird | 1800–2600 g | Not a cut |
| Whole quail | Whole bird | 120–200 g | Not a cut |
| Ox heart | Offal | 40–80 g | Not a cut |
| Chorizo | SausageInterior contamination risk — cook through | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
Seafood (20)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salmon fillet | Fillet | 120–220 g | Not a cut |
| Whole trout | Whole fish | 250–400 g | Not a cut |
| Tuna steak | Steak | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Whole mackerel | Whole fish | 250–450 g | Not a cut |
| Whole sardines | Whole fish | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
| Whole sea bass | Whole fish | 400–700 g | Not a cut |
| Cod fillet | Fillet | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| King prawns in the shell | In the shell | 20–35 g | Not a cut |
| Peeled king prawns | Shelled | 12–25 g | Not a cut |
| Scallops | Shelled | 20–40 g | Not a cut |
| Squid | Shelled | 80–200 g | Not a cut |
| Mussels in the shell | In the shell | 15–30 g | Not a cut |
| Whole side of salmon | Fillet | 800–1500 g | Not a cut |
| Swordfish steak | Steak | 180–280 g | Not a cut |
| Monkfish fillet | Fillet | 200–400 g | Not a cut |
| Halved lobster | In the shell | 250–450 g | Not a cut |
| Oysters in the shell | In the shell | 50–100 g | Not a cut |
| Octopus tentacles | Shelled | 100–250 g | Not a cut |
| Whole crab | In the shell | 600–1200 g | Not a cut |
| Whole squid | Shelled | 150–300 g | Not a cut |
Vegetables (35)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole sweet pepper | Whole vegetable | 120–200 g | Not a cut |
| Corn on the cob | Whole vegetable | 200–350 g | Not a cut |
| Aubergine slices | Cut vegetable | 250–500 g | Not a cut |
| Courgette slices | Cut vegetable | 150–300 g | Not a cut |
| Asparagus spears | Whole vegetable | 20–40 g | Not a cut |
| Onion slices | Cut vegetable | 100–200 g | Not a cut |
| Whole onion | Whole vegetable | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Spring onions | Whole vegetable | 10–20 g | Not a cut |
| New potatoes, halved | Cut vegetable | 30–60 g | Not a cut |
| Sweet potato slices | Cut vegetable | 150–300 g | Not a cut |
| Cabbage wedges | Cut vegetable | 150–300 g | Not a cut |
| Cauliflower florets | Cut vegetable | 30–60 g | Not a cut |
| Halved tomatoes | Cut vegetable | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
| Green beans | Whole vegetable | 5–10 g | Not a cut |
| Halved romaine lettuce | Cut vegetable | 150–350 g | Not a cut |
| Broccoli florets | Cut vegetable | 25–50 g | Not a cut |
| Cauliflower steak | Cut vegetable | 150–250 g | Not a cut |
| Whole carrots | Whole vegetable | 50–100 g | Not a cut |
| Whole beetroot | Whole vegetable | 100–200 g | Not a cut |
| Halved leeks | Cut vegetable | 80–150 g | Not a cut |
| Fennel wedges | Cut vegetable | 50–90 g | Not a cut |
| Butternut squash slices | Cut vegetable | 50–100 g | Not a cut |
| Whole garlic head | Whole vegetable | 40–70 g | Not a cut |
| Halved pak choi | Cut vegetable | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
| Halved chicory | Cut vegetable | 40–80 g | Not a cut |
| Whole aubergine | Whole vegetable | 250–400 g | Not a cut |
| Whole jacket potato | Whole vegetable | 200–350 g | Not a cut |
| Whole okra | Whole vegetable | 8–15 g | Not a cut |
| Whole jalapeños | Whole vegetable | 15–30 g | Not a cut |
| Padrón peppers | Whole vegetable | 5–12 g | Not a cut |
| Halved artichokes | Cut vegetable | 80–150 g | Not a cut |
| Brussels sprouts | Whole vegetable | 15–30 g | Not a cut |
| Whole cauliflower | Whole vegetable | 700–1200 g | Not a cut |
| Corn tortillas | Flatbread | 20–35 g | Not a cut |
| Arepas | Dough round | 80–140 g | Not a cut |
Mushrooms (3)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Button mushrooms | Whole mushroom | 15–30 g | Not a cut |
| Portobello mushroom | Whole mushroom | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
| King oyster mushrooms | Cut mushroom | 40–90 g | Not a cut |
Plant-based (4)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firm tofu | Cut pieces | 200–400 g | Not a cut |
| Tempeh | Cut pieces | 150–300 g | Not a cut |
| Plant-based burger | Burger pattyInterior contamination risk — cook through | 100–150 g | Not a cut |
| Seitan slices | Block or slab | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
Cheese (3)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Halloumi | Cheese block | 200–250 g | Not a cut |
| Paneer | Cheese block | 200–400 g | Not a cut |
| Frying cheese | Cheese block | 200–400 g | Not a cut |
Fruit (9)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pineapple rings | Cut fruit | 60–120 g | Not a cut |
| Peach halves | Cut fruit | 70–130 g | Not a cut |
| Bananas in the skin | Whole fruit | 120–200 g | Not a cut |
| Watermelon wedges | Cut fruit | 100–200 g | Not a cut |
| Halved figs | Cut fruit | 20–40 g | Not a cut |
| Halved lemons | Cut fruit | 30–60 g | Not a cut |
| Mango cheeks | Cut fruit | 80–160 g | Not a cut |
| Halved apples | Cut fruit | 70–130 g | Not a cut |
| Halved plantain | Cut fruit | 120–220 g | Not a cut |
Breads & dough (3)
| Food | Form | Typical weight | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pizza | Dough round | 300–600 g | Not a cut |
| Flatbread | Flatbread | 60–150 g | Not a cut |
| Pita bread | Flatbread | 50–90 g | Not a cut |
Where to go next
What a cut is, where it sits on the animal, and what it is called in your country.
Your food, your cooker, your setup — and a window rather than a single number.
How much to buy, shown as a portion figure, whose it is, and the arithmetic.
What goes on it before the fire, and what the smoke actually contributes.