Competition barbecue, explained by people who have cooked it. The technique, the clock, the scoresheet — and the gear that actually earns its place at a contest.
Start here: how a barbecue contest actually works
Four meats, four fixed turn-in times thirty minutes apart, and a scoresheet where taste is worth roughly four times appearance. That one weighting explains almost everything competition cooks do that looks strange from the outside.
Competition BBQ: how KCBS contests work and how judges score →
From the circuit
Reports from contests and events — Memphis in May, the American Royal, Jack Daniel's, Tupelo, Goat Days and the rest. What happened, what worked, and what we learned watching teams who knew more than we did.
Browse all competition coverage →
Technique that comes from competing
The things that separate a contest cook from a backyard cook are rarely secrets. They are details nobody bothers to explain properly.
- The money muscle — where it is, how to separate it, and why it finishes fifteen degrees before the rest of the shoulder. Get this wrong and you lose the best part of the butt.
- Competition technique — ribs, timing, and the habits that exist because of the clock.
- Recipes — pork, chicken, whole hog and the rest, written to be cooked rather than skimmed.
Gear: what earns its place
Competition does not require expensive equipment. It requires equipment you can trust on a fixed clock — which is a different thing, and cheaper than most people expect.
- Thermometers — the single upgrade that improves results more than any cooker.
- Grills — pellet, charcoal, gas, kamado: which fuel suits how you cook, and what the spec sheets do not tell you.
- Smokers — drum, pellet and offset.
- The full gear guide — organised by what you are cooking, with what actually matters in each category.
If you are new to this
Three places to start, in order:
- How contests work — even if you never compete, understanding the scoresheet changes how you cook.
- Which fuel suits you — before any model, decide the type.
- The money muscle — the piece of technique with the highest payoff per minute spent learning it.
Everything here is written to be useful rather than to fill a page. Where we cite a number, it comes from a source we name. Where we have not tested something ourselves, we say so.
We hope you enjoyed this article about Barbecue 360.