BBQ

Holy Smokes, A Lowcountry Barbecue Festival, returns to Riverfront Park in North Charleston on Saturday, November 14, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., for its sixth year. More than 40 pitmasters and chefs from around the country will cook across four villages, Traditional, Texas, New School and Coastal, from whole hog to Texas brisket and smoked Lowcountry seafood, and every ticket includes all-you-can-eat access to all four, the Charleston visitors bureau says.

General admission is $95 and includes food and live music, with drinks for sale. VIP is $250, with food and drinks included, extra bites and a private bar. Children 7 to 13 are $25, and 6 and under get in free. Tickets are sold at holysmokeschs.com.

The festival has raised more than $460,000 for Hogs for the Cause and Ronald McDonald House Charities of Charleston, which both support families whose children have pediatric brain cancer.

SmellaQue, a team from Calgary, Alberta, was named grand champion of the 37th Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue in Lynchburg, Tennessee, on October 10, winning $25,000 and a chance to defend its title next year, the Lynchburg Times reports. B's Que was reserve grand champion and took $10,000. Ninety-nine teams from around the world competed in categories including pork ribs, pork shoulder, brisket, chicken, dessert, Jack Daniel's sauce and cook's choice. "This title means so much to us because it's a win for the entire international community," pitmaster Janice Smella said, according to Jack Daniel's. Last year's winner was Kings BBQ of Jacksonville, Florida.

The Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue, known as the Jack, runs October 9 and 10 at Wiseman Park in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Only around 90 teams get in, each having won a qualifying contest such as a state championship, and the field usually includes a deep international contingent. Admission has traditionally been free, with a voluntary donation to the Moore County schools.

It comes a week after the American Royal World Series of Barbecue, which ran September 30 to October 4 on the Royal's new campus in Kansas City, Kansas, for the first time. Because the campus is still under construction, the event was limited to invited guests, with no main stage or public activities, and turkey was dropped from the categories.

The Royal's Invitational came down to a hundredth of a point. Pennsylvania's B's Que won with 709.6916, ahead of Munny's Stove at 709.6800, with Porky Butts BBQ third, according to the Smoke Sheet newsletter, which links the full KCBS results. Sunday's Open, with 360 teams including 22 from 11 countries, went to Smokey Bey's Barbecue of Charles Winslow-Bey at 708.5600, ahead of Pop A Top Cookers and Porky Butts. A nine-year-old from Croatia won the Kids Que at her first competition. The Royal itself had not posted results on its site when this was written.

If you are going to Lynchburg, arrive early: parking fills quickly in a town of a few hundred people.

Walmart is recalling about 4,477,655 Expert Grill metal wire-bristle grill brushes, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced October 1. Small wire bristles can come loose, stick to the grill or the food, and be swallowed, which the agency says can cause serious internal injuries that may need surgery. No incidents or injuries have been reported.

Five products are covered, identified by the model number on the packaging or on a sticker or tag on the brush: EX5607031616002, the 16-inch steel fiber scrub brush and scraper; EX5607031616003, the handheld steel fiber scrub brush; XG1310700206, the 21-inch three-head brush; XG1136178597003, the 17.7-inch long-handle brush with scraper; and XG1410700124, the 10-piece stainless grill tool set, which includes a brush. They have black plastic or stainless steel handles, and some have a metal scraper attached.

They were sold at Walmart stores and on Walmart.com from January 2021 through August 2026 for $1 to $28.

Stop using the brush now. Walmart will give a full refund or a credit for use in its stores or online, and will ask you to return the brush or throw it away. Walmart's recall line is 800-925-6278, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Central, Monday through Friday. If you have been using one, look over the grate and any food cooked on it for loose wire before the next cook.

The BBQ World Cup ran a global qualifier series through spring, with grand champions and reserves at contests around the country punching tickets to a hundred-team final in Las Vegas for a one million dollar prize. That is the largest purse the sport has had, by a distance, and it changes the arithmetic of competing. A circuit where a good weekend paid for the fuel now has an event where one weekend pays for the rig.

Memphis in May's World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, the 'Super Bowl of Swine' and the oldest prestige title in the sport, had its own first in May: a back-to-back grand champion for the first time in 42 years. Repeat winning at that level is rare because the field is enormous and the judging is blind.

Memphis also launched an inaugural Open Fire World Championship alongside the traditional categories, headlined by the Argentine live-fire cook Al Frugoni. That is a deliberate widening. Whole hog, shoulder and ribs are the American competition canon; open fire is the rest of the world's, and the festival is acknowledging that the audience has moved.

None of this touches your backyard directly. It matters because competition is where technique gets tested against other people's technique rather than against a recipe, and because the money now arriving will pull in cooks who could not previously justify the travel.

If you want to see it rather than read about it, competitions are open to spectators and many teams offer tastings. One bite of championship brisket recalibrates what you think the ceiling is.

If your smoke flavour is thin, run the cook lower for the first stretch. Smoke adheres best to cool, damp meat, and the fire burns cleanest — which is to say, least smokily — at higher set points. Start at the bottom of the dial, let the surface dry slowly, and raise the temperature once the colour is where you want it.

Manage ash and grease on a schedule rather than when the grill complains. Testing teams keep finding that cleanup and the temperature controller separate these machines more than brand does, and a fouled burn pot is the most common cause of a unit that will not hold a set point. That is a maintenance problem misdiagnosed as a hardware problem every day.

Do not expect a pellet grill to sear. The high-heat modes are a compromise. A $20 charcoal chimney finishes a steak better than any of them, and running the two together costs less than the upgrade that promises to do both.

Treat the connectivity honestly. Remote temperature monitoring at hour nine of a brisket is genuinely useful. App-driven recipe assistance is a demo feature if you already know how you want to cook something, and it is not worth paying a premium for.

The cheapest real upgrade is a second probe you trust. Grill thermometers read the air near the probe, not the meat, and the gap between the two is where most disappointing cooks live.

Traeger launched the Westwood series in April, an entirely new grill lineup aimed at cooks getting into wood-fired cooking rather than at people replacing a worn-out smoker. It sits alongside the Woodridge range the company built out for its fortieth year, which runs from a base model through Pro and Elite.

The Woodridge quietly gained a Pro Plus at the end of last year, slotting between the Pro and the Elite. Four hundred dollars over the standard Pro buys an enclosed storage cabinet in place of the open side shelf and four casters instead of two. That sounds like trim until you have chased a pellet bag around a deck in the wind.

What has actually changed in the category is the competition. A shopper looking at pellet grills this year is choosing between Traeger, Recteq, Yoder, Brisk It and Ninja, and the newer entrants are competing on features rather than on price alone. Several now ship with app-driven recipe assistance over wifi.

Our read on the smart features is that they are worth having and not worth paying a premium for. If you already know how you want to cook something, the value of a grill telling you is close to zero; the connectivity that matters is being able to check a temperature from inside the house at hour nine.

The pellet grill won the backyard because it removed the part of barbecue that beats beginners: holding a temperature for nine hours without babysitting a fire. An auger feeds pellets, a controller holds the set point, and a first brisket comes out edible. That is a genuine achievement and it is why the category exploded.

What you give up is smoke. Pellet grills run cleaner and hotter than a stick burner at the same dial setting, and the smoke ring and bark that competition cooks chase are harder to get. Manufacturers have answered with dedicated smoke modes that drop the fan and fire cycle at low temperatures, which helps and does not close the gap.

The searing question is the other one. Most pellet grills top out below what a steak wants, and the high-heat modes are a compromise rather than a solution. If you want both, the honest answer is a pellet grill and a cheap charcoal chimney rather than one appliance that claims both.

Test kitchens that have run these side by side keep arriving at the same conclusion: assembly time, cleanup and the quality of the temperature controller separate them more than brand loyalty does. Ash and grease management in particular is where cheap units lose people by the third cook.

Roughly 37,000 Traeger Flatrock flat-top propane griddles, SKU 1DFL42LLA, were recalled because burner control knobs can be incorrectly labeled, which can leave the grill unintentionally running. Sold at Ace, Home Depot and Scheels from February through October 2023 for about $900. Fifty-seven reports of mislabeled knobs, no fires or injuries reported. The remedy is a free repair kit. It is an old recall, which is exactly why a griddle bought secondhand may never have been checked.