BBQ recipes, grilling tips, and smoker secrets — delivered to your inbox.
✓ You're in! Check your inbox to confirm.
Lumber Jack wins price. Knotty Wood wins regional flavor. CookinPellets wins consistency. Tested side-by-side on a 14-hour brisket — which brand wins for your cook style.
Pit Boss wins on cubic inches, hopper, and searing. Traeger wins on app, support, and ecosystem. The 2026 head-to-head pitmasters actually use to decide.
Smokefire wins searing crust and crown. Ironwood wins overnight reliability and app polish. The 2026 head-to-head — by cook style, not by spec sheet.
More than 20 pitmasters compete for the 2026 Rib King NYC crown on May 23. The lineup, the format, the wood choices, and what to watch for at Brooklyn Navy Yard.
A whole watermelon, salt-cured and smoked for 8 hours, comes off the grill looking nearly identical to a glazed Christmas ham. The recipe that goes viral every time.
Reverse sear works on thin steaks (1–1.5 inches) — just smoke cooler, sear hotter, and pull earlier. The full step-by-step that gives wall-to-wall pink without the overcook.
Tested against potato salad, baked beans, watermelon, and corn on the cob over 3 Memorial Day cookouts in 2025: 5 sides that earned the swap. Smoked mac, grilled watermelon salad, burnt-ends beans, smoked deviled eggs, grilled corn esquites.
Wagyu ground is $18–$24/lb. Cook it past medium and the fat that makes it Wagyu renders straight onto the grill. The technique that protects that investment: low handling, simple seasoning, 130°F pull, minimal toppings.
Bark and crust on brisket are different things. Bark is dark, flavorful, pliable. Crust is hard and dehydrated. The difference comes from fat cap, smoker temp, and surface moisture.
Pellet smoker stalls at 165°F because the meat is sweating — surface evaporation cools the protein as fast as the smoker heats it. Four fixes: butcher paper, foil, crank the temp, or wait it out.
Tri-tip vs. brisket: which one wins for your Memorial Day cookout? The decision matrix — cook time, cost-per-person, group size, skill ceiling — and how to cook each one right.
Memorial Day brisket math, in one table: 1/2 lb cooked per adult, 1/4 lb per child, +20% safety. Plus the raw-weight conversion, ribs/pork/chicken/tri-tip portions, and the buy-by-May-20 timeline.
