Tools
Four questions people actually get stuck on, and one search box. Each of these shows its working — where the number came from, what it assumed, and where it stops — and each will tell you it does not know rather than produce a plausible figure.
Choosing and planning
Which kind of BBQ suits me?
Six questions about fuel, smoke, how involved you want to be, how many you cook for, whether it moves and whether there is power. Comes back with the kinds that fit, the ones that nearly fit, and every one that was ruled out with the sentence that ruled it out.
11 kinds of cooker · recommends types, never products
How long will this take?
Choose a food, a cooker and a setup from what BBQHQ actually has evidence for, and get a window with its reasoning attached. Combinations with nothing behind them are shown greyed out with the reason rather than hidden.
Refuses rather than extrapolating outside the evidence
When do I light the fire?
Works backwards from when you want to eat — through carving, resting, the cooking window, preheat and setup. For long cooks it switches to finishing early and holding, rather than promising a completion minute it cannot keep.
24 worked questions, each showing its evidence strength
How much meat do I buy?
Guests and appetite in, raw shopping weight out — shown as the portion figure, whose it is, the multiplication and the cooked yield as separate steps rather than as a total you have to trust.
Portion evidence for 1 foods; it refuses for the rest
When something is wrong
What went wrong?
Diagnosis rather than advice. Each problem separates causes that look identical on the grate — chicken pink at the bone is not the same fault as chicken pink throughout — and says what to check to tell them apart.
31 problems, with escalation where it matters
This one or that one?
Two cookers, two foods, two techniques or two fuels, side by side on the dimensions that genuinely differ. No scores and no winner — where BBQHQ can offer a condition instead, it does.
70 comparisons
Or just ask
Search the whole catalogue — 7439 questions are mapped to the page that answers them, and a question with no answer returns an honest empty result rather than the nearest page that shares a word with it.
Why none of these gives you a single number
A cooking time depends on thickness, weight, geometry, bone, skin, starting temperature, cooker, fuel, target temperature, weather, altitude and how much else is on the grate. Any single figure is true for one cook and misleading for the rest — so BBQHQ gives a window and shows you which of those factors made it that wide.
The same discipline applies to the ones that look simpler. The party planner will not estimate a portion for a food nobody has published a portion for, and the cooker chooser does not rank its suggestions, because ranking would mean deciding whether portability matters more than capacity — and nothing in the evidence answers that.
Where to go next
Eleven kinds, what each is for, and what is harder about it.
126 of them, grouped by what they are and how long they need.
What counts as evidence here, and what makes BBQHQ refuse to answer.