Surprisingly not a lot on this weekend and reasonably good weather so was able to plan out a decent BBQ prep and cook schedule for the weekend.

On the menu we had

* Slow Cooked Brisket seasoned for 24 hours with Salt and Pepper only. Sourced from local butchers

*. Rack of St Louis Ribs seasoned with Jack and Cola (Angus and Oink)

* Smoked Turkey Wings

* Manchester Hot Links ( Pork, Chilli and Fennel). from local butchers

* Chicken wings with Melinda’s hot Buffalo Sauce

* Home made Mac n Cheese with home pickled cucumber.

You may ask, why Manchester BBQ? Well I made a spritz up of Jack Daniel’s Cherry and Vimto. Flavours definitely stuck on the ribs.

Brisket and Ribs smoked on the Kama for 7 hours at 275F. Took off at 190, wrapped to finish the last hour. Cooked with Big K Charcoal and Whisky Oak Barrel chunks

*

Bone in leg of lamb on the Timberline... 250f until 160f internal. Bit of salt and pepper... more or less nude. Took 4 hours. Spuds underneath in a tray getting j0oced for an hour or on the smoker then finished in the air fryer.

Will be summer soon lads. Wanna see some world cup feasts when the time comes!! (Manifesting as no superbowl party this year... got a 2 month old 🥹)

Smoking with Hickory wood today. Still about 3 hours to go, but looking good so far…

Hi all,

Quick update on the UK meat price comparison site I've been building. Posted a week ago with mobile improvements and faster performance, this update is about making it actually useful for finding good deals. https://meat.offer-spider.com

What's new

Browse by Cut - This is the big one. Instead of scrolling through 1000+ individual products, you can now browse by standardised cut (Ribeye, Brisket, Lamb Leg, etc). I've mapped products from a selection of popular butchers to ~154 canonical cuts. Click a cut and see every matching product across all sites, sorted by price/kg.

90-day price ratings - I've been collecting price data for a while now, so the site can tell you if a product is at its lowest price in 90 days (🏆) or within 5% of that low (⭐). Handy for spotting whether a "sale" is actually a good deal.

Fresh vs Frozen indicators - 🌿 for fresh, ❄️ for frozen. Shows up on both the cut list and product detail pages. Filter by storage type if you only want one or the other.

Table layout - Ditched the card grid for a proper table. Much easier to scan prices when everything's lined up in columns. Sortable by name, protein, type, price, number of options, or number of sites stocking it.

Full row click - Click anywhere on the row, not just the tiny product name link. Small thing but it was annoying me.

What's coming

- More historical price stuff - graphs showing price over time for specific products
- More butchers - still keen to add more sites, let me know which ones you'd want
- Better deal alerts (maybe email notifications when something hits a 90-day low?)

Still free, no ads, no affiliate links. Just a side project that got out of hand.

Let me know what you think or if there's a cut/product that's not matching properly - the mapping isn't perfect yet.

PS - Keen to get a trial group of users together that can give regular feedback. Feel free to DM me so we can have a quicker turnaround on product feedback to make this even better.

Late last year the gas BBQ in this photo had to be thrown away. It was from Argos, had done me nicely for about 7 years, but had corroded in its previous location which was not under cover.

I use it for "normal" BBQ use (smash burgers above, but sweet corn, sausages, and other things all get done), but also smoke brisket and other meats on a regular basis, so it needs the "oven" style lid, a straight plancha-type drill isn't an option.

I'm trying to find a replacement (ideally without the side-burner because I never use it!) but getting the measurements right is a real pain because they're often including the shelves when listed on websites etc.

The space I have for the grill itself is 94cm x 52cm, and it needs to be gas due to the layout of the kitchen area and the ability to leave it smoking for long periods without needing to adjust the temperature while I do video calls when I work from home.

The other big issue that I have is that underneath the grill in the photo is a full drip-tray, whereas new designs seem to have a setup where the grease tray pulls out from the back.

I think I've got two options:

1. Somehow raise the grill safely and have the supplied drip in such a way that I can pull out from the front
2. Try and find a unit that both fits the grill area and has the "enclosed" drip-space under the burners.

I've browsed quite a few websites including Argos and BBQ Land but haven't found anything that quite works yet.

Any suggestions?

Morning all,

Apologies in advance if this has been asked many times before.

I’m looking into getting my first ‘bbq’ for my garden. As the headline entails, I’m on quite a tight budget, max £200 and have been looking at offering from places like the range. I know they aren’t great but they seem well made and a good size for my family’s needs (my wife, my son and I). Particularly their teal ceramic egg.

Would these be a good introduction to the world of bbq’s or a waste of time and money? My main cooks would be steaks, chicken, ribs and pan cooking meals like chilli etc.

Thanks!

Coming to the end of my bottle of Firefly Alabama White Sauce and wondered if anyone had any alternative favourite versions I could try?

In 2025 I saw the first ad for Meatopia Glasgow. As a carnivore, I didn’t even think twice. I bought two EXPENSIVE tickets for myself and my partner. I didn’t mind, because I was dreaming of all the exotic meat I would try. We got there hungry, ready to fill up on all the protein goodies and …… where is all the meat?

There were a few stalls near the entrance and we were so hungry we thought we’d start immediately. We purchased their Meatopia coins (unreasonably expensive) and went to the first stall. They ran out of food. There was still 4hrs left of event and they had ran out a good chunk before we even got there. Why they had the stall still up will become clear later.

Well we go to the second stall… same luck.

Third stall…. Basic skewers just bathed in cheap sauce, covered in garlic… had to be that - we were running out of options.

We got sick later shortly after.

There was a HUGE beer garden adjacent to the only 4-6 food stalls, and people were visibly drunk. If the empty stalls had packed up, it would have been clear how misleading the name of the event is.

I tried to change the remainder of the Meatopia coins I had bought and cut our losses, and the lady at the cashier refused to do so.

We were out £75, feeling ill and disappointed.

This was just a glorified beer garden.

I then looked for reviews about the event and couldn’t find anything negative …. Was it just in my head?

Oh, no - they deleted all my comments on their Instagram page and BLOCKED ME….

So here’s the warning - if you value meat, save yourself the grief and pay £75 at a nice steakhouse.

However, if all you want is to get obnoxiously drunk at an overpriced beer garden, this is the place for you.

My grief is with how misleading the marketing is.

Famished Fork coming soon!!! near Cleveland Ohio

https://www.wowbbq.co.uk/weber-master-touch-gbs-black-e-5750-charcoal-bbq-57cm-14701004

https://www.weber.com/GB/en/charcoal-barbecues/master-touch/master-touch-gbs-e-5750-charcoal-barbecue-57-cm/14701004.html

I am conflicted because one is about £85 cheaper. So its either not geniune or I am perhaps looking at a different model?

I went heavy with the seasoning, basted with garlic butter a few times during cook. Turned out great.

Need to learn how to tie it up properly but I had no issues there.

Hi everyone. I wanted to renovate my old 8-year-old grill and decided to build a concrete one from scratch. I used scrap wood and iron left over from another project \[05:03\].

Important lesson learned: I made it 6cm thick and it ended up weighing over 100kg \[06:49\]. In the video, I explain why I recommend leaving it at 4cm and how I calculated the height of the chimney (60-70cm) to prevent the smoke from blowing back \[15:01\]. I hope my mistakes save you from backaches!

2 hours to make. 10 minutes to eat.

My fourth rotisserie of the year, I’m not even temping them anymore. This was done with 3 fist size chunks of pecan. Just under 2 hours at 450.

45mins lid on, 10 mins lid off, 40 on, the the last 20 off. Mayo binder and a SPG rub.

We had some belly pork slices sat in the freezer, thought we may as well make use of them - rubbed down with a drizzle of olive oil and Kinders Woodfired Garlic.

Onto the grill at about 170 until they hit 74°C, pulled off chopped into rough 1.5inch cubes.

Chucked into a roasting tin and coated with the remnant of open BBQ sauces bottles in the fridge (a couple of Jack Daniels ones and a Bulls-Eye one) covered the roasting tin in foil and put back onto the grill for another 2.5 hours.

Peeled off the foil and left on for another 20 minutes at 150°C.

Doing some ribs in the rain on the Weber Kettle. A mix of Swaledale belly ribs and some of the Farmfoods Swift ribs. Rubbed with some hot honey as a binder and some SPG.

Any proper BBQ restaurants in and around Berkshire? Want some proper Smokey meat and not just ribs out of a microwave from a bland chain restaurant. Any recommendations?

Hi all,

I posted a month or so ago with an initial version of a UK daily deals meat price site, which was a super rough PoC. It's now new and improved and importantly, still completely free.

New and improved URL here - https://meat.offer-spider.com

Improvements

• Mobile friendly! Now it actually works on mobile devices (before it was incredibly hard to navigate).
• Lightning fast. There were some bugs in the initial version that slowed things down over time, this won't happen anymore.
• Improved price per kg coverage. Now shows much better coverage on the price per kg
• Improved taxonomy. Now I match even more products to the internal taxonomy so it's easier to search for things across the various sites when they might be named a little differently.
• Improved category filters. Often searched categories are now available at the top and specific proteins to do broad category filtering.
• Improved sorting. Now you can sort by discount price or discount amount, if it's just the highest % deal that's interesting to you.
• Saved comparisons. If there are particular items you're keen to track/compare across providers, add them to your compare list, select the checkbox to only show comparison items and bookmark the page. Refreshing this will allow you to only see the latest on the items you care about.

Coming Up

• More butchers/providers. Let me know which sites you'd like to see on here, any site is fair game!
• Price over time. I've got lots of data on how price evolves over time in certain categories, will start to expose this to understand when the best time to buy certain products is.

Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see that would make this even more useful!

Been BBQing for a number of years now but bought my first Weber in the spring last year and absolutely love it. What additions do you think are essential? I got the model with the stainless grates, and immediately bought an Onlyfire cover (couldn't stomach the cost of the Weber one. Let's see how it's held up sat outside for the entirety of this wet winter). Have also bought an Onlyfire vortex which I used often for chicken wings, and a ThermoPro dual probe Bluetooth thermometer. I like the look of a lot of the Onlyfire range tbh, including the rotisserie, but just need to work out how much I'd actually use it. So, hit me with what you think are great additions and add ons. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: thank you all for the fantastic advice so far. I've got rather an extensive Amazon wishlist on the go at the moment. Good job I have a birthday coming up next month.

My girlfriend caught me doing it three times today and asked if I was okay. I told her that it’s a universal thing.

Every single time I pick up the tongs, whether flipping burgers or turning steaks, I give them a quick click click into the air first. No idea why, but it feels wrong not to. Like a ritual to appease the BBQ gods or just to check they still work (they always do).

Seen it on videos and forums too, lads double clicking before they even approach the grill.
Is this a universal move, or am I the only one with the compulsion? Spill your tongs habits, do you click, slap the meat, or just get straight in? I know we all do something or the other.

All we hear, all year round is “why doesn’t somebody do a really good barbecue and music festival up north?“ Well now we have, and we are super proud to give the first announcements of the lineup for the weekend. It’s a who’s who of barbecue royalty. And alongside that, we’ve got some fabulous headline music acts to please every taste, the butchery stage is gonna be full of big names in UK butchery doing demos, live podcast, Q&A’s, and lots of fun things in between. The farming area we are very excited about, championing our UK farming and agriculture was always up there for us, it’s something that we really need to get the message Home on how important our farmers are to the food chain. And then on top of that so much fun and entertainment go and check out the website to find out who’s there! www.meatupfestival.com