Free plan
Free
Everything you need to cook, share and compete.
- Create recipes from scratch
- Share to The Pit with a web link
- Vote, comment and climb the leaderboard
- Save up to 10 recipes
- 5 photo or notes imports a month
Free on the App Store
BBQ Chef is the iPhone app for writing up your cooks, sharing them with The Pit and climbing the pitmaster leaderboard as the upvotes roll in. Brisket, ribs, rubs and sauces, with the temps, wood and setup that actually worked.
How it works
BBQ Chef turns the cooks you're proud of into recipes other pitmasters can follow, vote on and fire up themselves.
Build a recipe from scratch on a live recipe card, or import one from a cookbook photo or your own notes. Add a photo of the result.
Post it to the community feed. It gets its own page at bbqchef.app that anyone can open, with or without the app.
Every upvote from another pitmaster pushes you up the leaderboard, all-time and this month.
The Pit
Browse recipes from real backyard and competition cooks. Vote up the ones worth firing up and leave a comment when you've cooked one.
Pitmaster leaderboard
Upvotes on the recipes you share rank you against every other pitmaster, with recipes shared as the tiebreaker. Your profile shows your rank, upvotes and recipes, and has its own link to share.
Create
Build a recipe on a live card that looks exactly like the finished thing: ingredients, BBQ setup, steps, temps and equipment, in imperial or metric.
Write up your own cook and share it to The Pit.
Snap a cookbook page, printout or handwritten card and get an editable recipe card.
Paste or type a recipe you already have.
Describe the cook and get a starting point to edit.
Your collection
Save recipes to your collection and pick them up on any device. Recipes you create on the website appear in the app automatically.
Sign in with Apple or Google and your recipes follow you.
Save recipes for offline use, so the steps are there when the signal isn't.
Turn any recipe into a clean PDF for the cook.
Pounds and °F or grams and °C. Your call.
See it in action
Need a starting point? Tell BBQ Chef what you're making and it drafts a recipe for your setup that you can edit, save and share.
Real screen recording from the BBQ Chef app
Pricing
Creating, sharing, voting and the leaderboard are free for everyone. Pitmaster Pro is there when you want more.
Free plan
Everything you need to cook, share and compete.
Optional upgrade
An in-app subscription for pitmasters who cook a lot.
Upgrade any time inside the app. Billed through your Apple ID.
FAQ
BBQ Chef is a free iPhone app for barbecue recipes and a community of pitmasters. You write up recipes you've actually cooked, share them to a community feed called The Pit and climb a leaderboard ranked by the upvotes your recipes receive. Every shared recipe also gets its own public web page at bbqchef.app.
Yes. Downloading BBQ Chef, creating recipes, sharing to The Pit, voting, commenting and the leaderboard are all free. The free plan saves up to 10 recipes and includes 5 photo or notes imports a month.
Pitmaster Pro is an optional in-app subscription that unlocks unlimited saves and imports, drafting help, remixing any Pit recipe for your own smoker and offline access to your full collection.
BBQ Chef is available for iPhone on the App Store and needs iOS 15 or later.
The Pit is the BBQ Chef community feed. It's full of recipes shared by backyard and competition cooks, sorted by hot, new or top, filterable by twelve categories and searchable by keyword. You can upvote recipes and leave a comment once you've cooked one.
Pitmasters are ranked by the total upvotes received on the recipes they've shared to The Pit, with the number of recipes shared as the tiebreaker. There's an all-time board and a this-month board, and your rank appears on your profile, which has its own shareable link.
Yes. Every recipe in The Pit has its own page at bbqchef.app that anyone can open in a web browser. On an iPhone with BBQ Chef installed, the same link opens straight in the app. You can also export any recipe as a PDF.
Yes. Import from Photo turns a photo of a cookbook page, printout or handwritten recipe card into an editable recipe card, and Import from Notes does the same with text you paste or type. You can review and edit everything before saving.
Yes. Save your setup to your profile, from charcoal kettles, kamados and offset smokers to pellet grills, gravity-fed, drum and electric smokers, gas grills and flat-top griddles, along with your preferred woods: hickory, mesquite, cherry, apple, oak, pecan, maple or alder. Recipes include a BBQ setup section, and Pitmaster Pro can remix any Pit recipe for your own cooker.
Yes. Choose imperial or metric in your profile and BBQ Chef shows ingredients and temperatures in your preferred system, such as pounds and °F or grams and °C.
Yes. You sign in with Apple or Google, so there's no new password to remember. Your recipes and preferences then sync across your devices, and recipes you create on the website appear in the app automatically.