Cook Time Calculator

It gives a range because no honest number exists. The shape of the model (cook time grows with about the square of thickness, the stall is evaporative cooling, a hotter pit is faster) comes from food science. The numbers on top of it are central values from many cooks’ reports, and those reports disagree by 20% or more. Wind, fuel, the condition of your cooker and the individual piece of meat all matter. Treat it as a plan, cook to the probe, and let your own logged cooks take over.

A finished brisket can be held hot for hours and still turn in well. A brisket that is not done at the posted time cannot be turned in at all. So the schedule puts each meat on early enough to finish at the slow end of its range, and the early number tells you when to start checking.

Yes, in the sense that matters on contest day. Meat is inspected, then trimmed and seasoned, and then it sits until it goes on. A cook that takes six hours instead of ten puts the meat on four hours later, so the rub has four more hours on it before the heat. The calculator shows that difference per meat.

Cooks report both finishing sooner than Choice, and which of the two is quicker is disputed. American Wagyu is usually described as the fattiest and the sooner of the two. It also tolerates a higher internal temperature before it dries out, so go by the probe, not the number. The calculator gives Wagyu a slightly shorter time and a wider range.

A little. A pan in a dry cooker (a drum, a stick burner) adds humidity and shortens the stall. Taking the pan out of a water-pan cooker (a Weber Smokey Mountain, a Backwoods) does the opposite. The calculator applies a small correction either way, and you can switch the pan on each cooker.

In BBQOps, after a cook, you log how long it really took. The calculator compares that with what it would have said and remembers the ratio for that cooker and that meat. After three cooks the correction counts in full and the range narrows. The free taste on this page does not keep a log.

This page is a free taste of the Cook Time Calculator: one cooker, one meat, and the start of the schedule. Planning every meat on every cooker together, the whole schedule, and printing, copying and downloading it are part of BBQOps teams.

Nowhere. The calculation runs in your browser, and your answers and logged cooks are kept in this browser’s local storage so a refresh does not lose them. Nothing is sent to BBQOps.

Choose “Something else”: it makes no assumption about the cooker and widens the range. If you built your own smoker, BBQOps lets you say how: offset, reverse-flow, vertical, cabinet or drum, what it burns, how the heat is held, its steel and its insulation. It works out a starting time and range from that, and the cooks you log correct it. Tell us what you cook on and we will add it to the list.

Yes, in two ways. How long a cooker takes to come up to temperature and settle before meat goes in depends on what it burns and how heavy it is: a pellet or gas cooker is ready in about half an hour, a charcoal cooker in about three quarters of an hour, a stick burner or a heavy trailer pit in an hour and a half or more. The schedule uses that to say when to light it. And how steady the heat is depends on how the fuel is fed: an auger or a thermostat holds a set point, a fire you feed by hand with splits swings more, which is why the range is wider.