BBQ Meat Calculator

Tell us how many people you are feeding and which meats you are cooking, and you get the raw weight to buy, cut by cut. That last part is the whole point: you buy meat raw and serve it cooked, and barbecue cuts lose an enormous fraction in between, so the number you take to the butcher is far larger than the number you put on the table.

Adults (count everyone who will eat like an adult, including the teenagers)

Children (roughly 12 and under. They eat about half an adult portion)

Appetites (cooked meat per adult: 1/3 lb is the standard planning figure, 1/2 lb for a buffet, 2/3 for a hungry crew)

Sides (a small adjustment, and the section below explains why ours is smaller than everybody else's)

Is the barbecue the only main course?

Yes, this is the meal No, there are other mains

Now pick your meats. Leave the share blank and we split the plate evenly between the cuts you choose. Fill the shares in if you want the plate weighted, for example 60 percent brisket and 40 percent pulled pork.

Meat 1

Share of the plate (%) (optional)

Meat 2

Share of the plate (%) (optional)

Meat 3

Share of the plate (%) (optional)

Meat 4

Share of the plate (%) (optional)

Meat 5

Share of the plate (%) (optional)

Work out what the meat will cost?

No Yes, I know my prices

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Data reviewed: August 2026. Figures here come from published sources and change over time. How we verify

The number that ruins barbecues

Almost every guide to this question answers it in cooked pounds and then stops. A third of a pound per person, they say, and they are right. The trouble is that nobody sells cooked brisket by the pound. You buy raw meat, you cook it for twelve hours, and somewhere in those twelve hours a large part of what you paid for leaves as steam and rendered fat and the trimmings in your bin.

Here is the whole problem in one line. A whole packer brisket comes off the pit at roughly half the weight it went on the scale at. So if you take the standard advice, work out that 40 guests need 13 pounds of cooked brisket, and buy 13 pounds of brisket, you will serve about 6 and a half pounds. You will be short by half, in front of 40 people, at a point in the afternoon when there is nothing at all you can do about it.

This calculator does that division for you, cut by cut, because different meats lose wildly different amounts. Cooked-ready hot links barely lose anything, because you are reheating something that was already cooked. A whole packer brisket loses about half. Spare ribs give back well under half, because you are buying a great deal of bone. A whole chicken, counting the frame you are never going to serve, lands around 40 percent. Applying one blanket rule of thumb across a mixed menu is how a plan that looked careful comes up short on the one meat everybody wanted.

The formula

cooked meat needed = guests × serving size × sides factor × other-mains factor
children count as half an adult
raw meat to buy = cooked meat needed ÷ that cut's cooked yield
rounded UP to the next half pound, always up
whole pieces = raw pounds ÷ the heavy end of that cut's usual piece weight

Serving size is a third of a pound of cooked meat for a standard plate with sides, half a pound for a buffet or a hungry crowd, two thirds for a genuinely big eating crowd, and a quarter pound for sandwiches. Cooked yield is the fraction of the weight you paid for that reaches a plate, after trimming, after the bone, and after the cook. That last definition is the one this page is fussy about, and the section near the bottom explains why it matters more than any other number here.

The rounding only goes one way, and that is deliberate. Running out of food is the failure people remember for a decade. Leftover barbecue is a sandwich.

Worked example

40 guests, barbecue as the only main, a plate split evenly between brisket and pulled pork, two or three sides.

Each adult gets the standard 0.33 pounds (5.3 ounces) of cooked meat, so 40 guests need 13.33 pounds of cooked meat. Split evenly, that is 6.67 pounds of each.

Now divide by what survives the cook. Brisket at 50 percent: 6.67 ÷ 0.50 = 13.33 pounds raw, rounded up to 13.5 pounds. Pork shoulder at 52 percent: 6.67 ÷ 0.52 = 12.82 pounds raw, rounded up to 13 pounds. Total: 26.5 pounds of raw meat to serve 13.33 pounds cooked, which is very nearly 2 times the weight you will actually put on the table.

At the counter that is one whole packer brisket (they run 12 to 16 pounds, and you want one from the heavy end) and 2 bone-in Boston butts. Weight the plate 60 percent brisket instead and the total barely moves, to 16 pounds of brisket and 10.5 of pork, because those two cuts happen to lose almost the same fraction. Swap the pork for spare ribs and it moves a lot, because ribs are mostly bone.

The number to hold onto is the one nobody prints: 26.5 raw to serve 13.33 cooked. Every guide that tells you a third of a pound a head is telling you the truth about the second number and leaving you to guess the first.

How much meat per person, and what actually moves it

The planning figure the catering world agrees on is a third of a pound of cooked meat per adult when barbecue is the main course and there are sides on the table. Half a pound is the figure for a buffet, a long day outdoors, or a crowd you know eats. Two thirds of a pound is what gets quoted for a genuinely hungry crowd, and on this page you reach it by choosing hearty appetites with barely any sides. A quarter pound is a sandwich portion, which is the right number for a lunch service and the wrong number for a wedding.

Children under about 12 eat roughly half an adult portion. Sonny's puts it as half a portion of meat and a full portion of sides. Dickey's puts it as one adult meal feeding two kids under 12. It is not quite unanimous, and here is the honest wrinkle: USDA's own child nutrition meal patterns do not support a 50 percent cut, since the school lunch weekly minimums for younger children run about 0.8 of the high school figure and the CACFP pattern is identical for ages 6 to 12 and 13 to 18. Those are nutritional minimums rather than appetite estimates, so they do not refute the catering convention, but they are the closest thing to a measured standard and they disagree with it. We use half. Teenagers are not children for this purpose. Put them in the adults box and thank us later.

Sides do less than everybody says, and this is the one place we part company with every other calculator. You will find the figure "reduce meat by 20 to 25 percent if you serve three or more sides" on a dozen barbecue calculators. We went looking for its source and there isn't one. The sites cite each other, and the one that does explain itself attributes the number to "pitmaster consensus". Every credible source, meaning the people actually selling barbecue, says only that sides reduce meat consumption slightly, and none of them gives a number. Meanwhile the only peer-reviewed evidence on the question runs the other way: a 2021 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that greater food variety is associated with increased intake, not less. So our adjustment is capped at 10 percent, half of what everyone else applies, you choose it rather than having it applied behind your back, and now you know exactly how much confidence to place in it.

Another main course changes everything, and this one is actually quantified. If there is a pasta bake or a fish option or a taco bar beside the smoker, the barbecue is sharing the plate. Meathead Goldwyn puts a serving at 8 ounces of cooked meat with one main dish and 6 ounces when two or more main courses are offered, and 6 over 8 is exactly the 25 percent reduction this page applies. That is a published figure from a named authority rather than a guess of ours, which makes it the best-supported adjustment on the page. It is also the most dangerous setting here, because being wrong about it means being short. If you are not sure the other main will really pull its weight, leave this on "barbecue is the meal".

And the honest caveat that belongs on every page like this one: appetites are not a constant. A wedding eats less than a football tailgate. A hot afternoon eats less than a cold one. A crowd that has been drinking for four hours eats more than you planned. These are planning figures, not physics.

Why a caterer plans by share of the plate

Ask the internet how much brisket per person and you get a third of a pound. Ask how much pulled pork and you get a third of a pound. Ask about ribs and you get four bones. Serve all three and follow all three answers and you have bought about a pound of meat a head, which is roughly three times what anybody is going to eat.

The fix is the one professionals use: decide the size of the plate first, then decide how that one plate is divided. A guest who piles on brisket takes less pork. That is why this calculator asks for a share of the total for each cut rather than a separate serving figure per meat, and why leaving the shares blank simply splits the plate evenly between whatever you picked.

A word on how to choose shares. If one meat is the star, give it 50 to 60 percent and let the rest fill in. Smoked sausage is the classic filler because it is cheap, it is nearly impossible to ruin, and being sold already cooked it loses almost no weight, so a 20 percent sausage share is the cheapest insurance on the menu. Fresh bratwurst is a different proposition entirely and yields barely half as much. If you are cooking for a crowd that includes people who do not eat pork or do not eat beef, that is a reason to run two meats rather than one, and to skew the shares toward whichever one more of your guests can eat.

Ribs are counted in bones, not pounds

Nobody stands at a pit thinking in pounds of rib. They think in racks and bones, and the published rule is 3 to 4 bones a person when ribs are part of a spread, 5 to 6 when ribs are the main event. Baby backs run a little higher because the bones are smaller: half a rack, or about six ribs, is the usual quote.

Those rules and the weight arithmetic on this page were built from completely different directions, so it is worth showing you that they land in the same place. The federal buying guide puts pork spare ribs at 0.39 pounds of cooked lean meat per pound purchased, the lowest federally measured figure for any cut on this page. A St. Louis cut rack is about 3 pounds raw with about 12 bones, so 0.39 puts about 1.6 ounces of cooked meat on each bone. Divide a standard third-of-a-pound serving by that and you get 3.4 bones per person. Divide a hearty half-pound serving by it and you get 5.1. Those are the two published rules, 3 to 4 and 5 to 6, reproduced by arithmetic that never looked at them. When two independent methods land on the same answer it is usually because both are describing something real.

Two corrections while we are here, both from the actual federal meat specifications rather than from barbecue folklore. First, trimming spare ribs to St. Louis style removes no rib bones at all. The cut takes off the sternum, the costal cartilage, and the rib tips, which is cartilage and one flat bone, so a St. Louis rack has exactly the same rib count as the spare rack it came from and simply weighs less. Second, there is no such thing as a standard rack weight. The federal specification for spare ribs requires at least 11 ribs and says in plain words that the purchaser may specify the number, leaving weight entirely alone. Every "a rack weighs three pounds" claim, including the 3 pounds this page uses, is trade convention. Retail racks in a supermarket today routinely run heavier than the foodservice specs the folklore was built on, which is another good reason to buy ribs by the rack and count the bones yourself.

One thing the rib numbers make obvious: a rack of ribs is a light portion by weight and an expensive one by the pound, because you are buying a great deal of bone. That is not an argument against ribs. It is an argument for knowing that a rib plate costs more per satisfied guest than a brisket plate, and for pricing accordingly if you are selling it.

What the cook does to your plan

Hours per pound is not a real rule. Cook time follows thickness far more than weight, so a 16 pound packer is not twice the cook of an 8 pound flat, and two packers side by side take roughly as long as one. Meathead Goldwyn puts the determinants as meat thickness, cooker temperature, and whether you wrap, with humidity, air temperature, wind, rain, and the grade of the meat all playing a part, and then gives a 14 to 18 hour range for one brisket at 225 degrees. The constraint on a big cook is pit space, not hours. If you need double the meat, you need double the grate, not double the day.

Plan to be done early, never on time. This is the single most useful sentence in barbecue. Finished meat holds for hours wrapped and packed in a dry cooler, and most of what people call resting is really the tail end of cooking: in a long cook, the great majority of the tenderising happens in the final push and the early part of the hold, not in the first eight hours. Meat that stalls at hour eight with guests already parked outside cannot be rescued by anything. Aim to be finished two hours before you serve and treat that buffer as part of the recipe.

Hold it hot, and know the number. USDA puts the danger zone at 40 to 140 degrees F, so cooked meat should be held at 140 degrees F or above until it is served. Once it leaves the heat, do not let it sit out more than 2 hours, or more than 1 hour if it is above 90 degrees outside. There is a wrinkle worth knowing if you are cooking commercially: the FDA Food Code, which is what a health inspector actually enforces on a caterer, sets hot holding at 135 degrees and explicitly allows 130 for roasts, and a whole brisket or pork butt is a roast under that section. We publish 140 because it is the consumer guidance, it is the higher number, and the error here only runs one way. And notice what all of this means for the practice pitmasters already follow: holding a wrapped brisket at 150 to 160 in a cooler for three hours is comfortably above every one of those lines. In barbecue the danger is in the cooling, not the holding.

Rest, then slice, and only slice what you are serving. Sliced brisket dries out quickly, and pulled pork sitting in a pan loses moisture fast. Slice to order if you can, and pour the rendered juices back into the pulled pork rather than leaving them in the pan. That last trick is worth several percent of yield on its own, which on a big cook is a genuine pound or two of food.

Where the published yield numbers disagree, and why

You will see cooking-loss figures quoted everywhere, and a lot of them are the wrong kind of number for this job. The federal cooking-yield tables define yield as the hot cooked weight divided by the raw weight of that same trimmed sample. That measures the cook and only the cook. It does not include the fat cap you cut off, the deckle you threw away, or the bone you are never going to serve. So "meat loses 30 to 40 percent in cooking" is a perfectly true sentence about a trimmed sample, and applying it to the weight on the package quietly asks it to cover the fat cap and the bone as well. It is an easy join to make, and the error runs in only one direction: the one that leaves you short.

This page uses purchase to plate: cooked, edible meat as a fraction of the weight printed on the package you paid for. On that basis the published brisket figures run from 36 percent, which is what a working Austin pitmaster gets in sellable slices at commercial trim standards, to 69 percent, which is the federal buying guide's number for brisket bought practically free of fat. That is not a disagreement about physics. It is four different questions wearing the same word. The figures that are genuinely about a whole packer cluster between 43 and 57, and we use 50, with every result showing what the ends of that range would cost you. The federal buying guide disagrees with itself here in the most instructive way possible: the same cut is 0.46 pounds per pound purchased at quarter-inch trim and 0.69 practically free of fat. Trim spec, not cooking, is what moves brisket yield most.

Pulled pork is the one where two numbers get swapped constantly, and it is an easy swap to make, because it is also the place where the sources agree best once you sort them out. The federal buying guide gives 0.52 pounds of cooked lean meat per pound as purchased for a bone-in shoulder and 0.60 for boneless, and a documented cook weighed an 8.37 pound bone-in butt down to 4.42 pounds of pulled pork, which is 52.8 percent. Federal data and a man with a scale agree to within a point. The 60 percent figure printed on most barbecue pages is the boneless number. Apply it to the bone-in butt most people actually buy and you are about 15 percent short before you light the fire.

Sausage carries the other trap, and it is bigger than the brisket one. Fully cooked links get no yield reduction at all in the federal tables: a pound of frankfurters is listed as eight two-ounce servings, which is sixteen ounces per pound. Raw sausage is 0.47 pounds of cooked lean meat per pound purchased for market-style pork, 0.62 for Italian style. Those are the same word for two things that differ by a factor of nearly two, which is why this calculator lists them as separate cuts. Classic barbecue hot links are sold cooked and only reheated. Bratwurst is not.

Where we could not find a measured figure, we say so rather than inventing precision. The baby back and chicken quarter yields are ours, composed from rack geometry and federal cook-loss data. Beef plate ribs are the shakiest number on the page and we would rather admit it: the federal study for boneless beef short ribs reports a standard deviation of 11.76 with an observed range from 44.9 to 97.3 percent, against brisket's standard deviation of 3.04. A single confident number for beef ribs would be dishonest, so that cut gets the widest band here. What we have not done anywhere is round a yield in the flattering direction, because the error only hurts in one direction, and it hurts in front of everybody you invited.

If you are scaling a recipe for the sides rather than the meat, the recipe scaler handles the parts that do not multiply cleanly, and the cooking measurement converter sorts out an old recipe's units.

Sources

Where the numbers on this page come from. We go to the body that publishes the figure, not to another calculator. Figures on this page were checked against these sources in August 2026. See how we verify.

Food Buying Guide for Child Nutrition Programs, Meats and Meat Alternates Yield Table, USDA Food and Nutrition Service. MEASURED, and the primary anchor for most of the yields on this page, because it is the one federal table published on the basis a shopper needs: pounds of cooked lean meat per pound AS PURCHASED. Figures used here: beef brisket without bone at 1/4 inch trim 0.46, the same brisket practically free of fat 0.69 (that pair is federal data disagreeing with itself for a stated reason, and it shows that trim spec moves brisket yield more than cooking does); pork shoulder bone-in 0.52 and boneless 0.60, which is the pair most barbecue pages have quietly swapped; pork picnic bone-in 0.43; pork spareribs 0.39, the lowest federally measured yield used here; whole chicken 0.44 with skin and 0.36 without; whole turkey 0.53 with skin, boneless turkey 0.70; raw market-style pork sausage 0.47 and Italian style 0.62, against fully cooked frankfurters and bologna which are listed with NO yield reduction at all (a pound of franks is eight 2 ounce servings, which is sixteen ounces). One caveat we state on the page: cooked lean meat excludes fat and skin, so for a barbecue plate that includes bark and rendered fat these figures behave as a floor.
Table of Cooking Yields for Meat and Poultry, Release 2, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Nutrient Data Laboratory. MEASURED, used here for a definition first and numbers second. The table defines Yield (%) = 100 x (Wch / Wcr), where Wch is the cooked sample weighed hot and Wcr is the weight of that same sample before cooking. It prices the cook and nothing else: not the fat cap removed in trimming, not the deckle, not the bone. Every page that quotes a cooking-loss percentage and applies it to a package weight is mixing two different measurements, always in the direction that leaves the host short. Numbers used: tri tip roast 84 percent (n=20, SD 3.05, range 77 to 89), which is the one figure here that transfers to real cooking because a tri tip is a whole-muscle roast at conventional doneness rather than a twelve hour render; chicken thigh 69 and drumstick 76 roasted; turkey breast 72 non-enhanced and 68 enhanced; pork spareribs roasted 76 and back ribs 82. And the number that made us widen a band: boneless beef short ribs 66.07 percent with SD 11.76 and an observed range of 44.9 to 97.3, against brisket's SD of 3.04. A single confident figure for beef ribs would be dishonest. NOTE ALSO: nothing in this table was cooked at barbecue endpoints. The brisket row is a braised flat. Some rows descend from Agriculture Handbook No. 102, whose lineage runs back to 1950.
Pork Butt Yield: Raw to Cooked Weight and Shrinkage, Destination BBQ. MEASURED, and the independent confirmation of the federal pulled pork figure. It documents an actual cook: an 8.37 pound bone-in butt finished at 4.42 pounds of pulled pork, which is 52.8 percent, rising to 4.83 pounds when the reserved juices were folded back in. Federal data at 0.52 and a man with a scale at 0.528 is the closest agreement anywhere in this dataset, which is why pulled pork is the one yield on this page we are confident about to the point. This is also the only source we found that publishes the formula itself, raw to buy equals cooked needed divided by expected yield.
Brisket Yield: How Much Meat to Expect from a Whole Packer, BBQ Host. REPORTED, one of several behind our 50 percent brisket figure. Average yield 50 percent, with 7 to 8 pounds of edible meat expected from a 14 pound packer. It also separates the two losses that most pages blur: roughly 1.5 to 2 pounds of fat comes off a 14 pound packer in trimming before it sees smoke, and the trimmed piece then shrinks by about a third in the cook. Corroborated on the packer basis by Smoked BBQ Source, Truth BBQ, Girls Can Grill (which puts packer trim loss at 20 to 30 percent and cook loss at 30 to 40 percent of the trimmed weight, totalling about 50) and a commercial worked example of 750 pounds of Choice packers losing 16 percent to trim and 34 percent to the cook, or 56.7 percent overall.
Brisket Yield Test: How to get the most out of your barbecue, Evan LeRoy, LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue, Austin. MEASURED, from a working commercial pitmaster, and the lowest credible brisket figure anywhere: 36 percent sellable sliced brisket, rising toward 70 percent only when every scrap is converted into burger, rendered tallow and crispy fat. It is low because it counts what a restaurant can actually sell as slices at commercial trim standards. We cite it on the page to show that the published brisket spread, roughly 36 to 69 percent, is not measurement noise but four different questions sharing one word.
BBQ Catering Portions: How Much Food to Order, Sonny's BBQ. REPORTED, the source of our serving band and the rib bone counts. A standard serving is 1/3 to 1/2 pound of COOKED meat per person, rising to 2/3 for a big eating crowd; ribs are 3 to 4 per person as part of a larger spread or 5 to 6 if ribs are the main event; children get about half a portion of meat and a full portion of sides; sides run 4 to 6 ounces each; and the order should carry 10 to 15 percent on top. Those two rib figures are the ones our own rib yield reproduces from an independent direction, which is the consistency check our test suite asserts. Where we part company: it also says a raw 10 pound brisket yields 6 to 7 pounds cooked and that meats lose 30 to 40 percent in cooking. Those are cook-loss figures for an already trimmed cut, and applying them to a package weight is the substitution this page exists to correct.
How Much Meat Per Person: BBQ Planning Guide, Smoked BBQ Source. REPORTED, used to corroborate the serving figures, the children adjustment and the rib counts: about 1/3 pound of meat per person as a main with three sides, children under 12 at about half an adult portion, brisket losing up to half its weight after trimming and cooking, pulled pork about half, half a rack or six ribs per person for baby backs, four or five for spares, and a whole rack put at 12 ribs. It is currently the top result for this question, and it is also the clearest illustration of the gap this page fills: it states both halves of the arithmetic, the third of a pound and the 50 percent yield, in different paragraphs, and never multiplies them into a raw shopping weight.
Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications, Fresh Pork Series 400, USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. MEASURED, and the source of two corrections this page makes to barbecue folklore. First, THERE IS NO STANDARD RACK WEIGHT: item 416 (spareribs) requires at least 11 ribs and states that the purchaser may specify the number, leaving weight to the buyer entirely, and item 422 (loin back ribs) requires at least 8. Every published rack weight is trade convention. Second, ST. LOUIS TRIMMING REMOVES NO RIB BONES: item 416A is produced from 416 by cutting through the costal cartilage, removing the sternum, cartilage and rib tips, and item 416B is defined as exactly that removed piece. A St. Louis rack therefore has the same rib count as the spare rack it came from and simply weighs less. Rack weight and bone count used here (about 3 pounds and about 12 bones for a St. Louis rack) follow Texas A and M Meat Science, which gives 12 to 15 ribs as typical for 416A, and retail guidance of 10 to 13.
Bird Breakdown: Exploring Yields and Cuts of Poultry, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. MEASURED, and one of the very few pieces of university extension work that touches this subject at all. A ready-to-cook chicken carcass is around 60 percent meat and 40 percent skin and bones; a leg quarter is 24 to 26 percent of the carcass and a breast quarter 26 to 28; broiler dressing percentage runs 72 to 75. Our leg quarter yield is EDITORIAL, composed from this carcass figure and the federal cook-loss numbers for thigh and drumstick, because no source publishes a purchase-to-plate figure for leg quarters directly. Worth recording as a negative result: Cooperative Extension has essentially not published on barbecue portioning. Iowa State Extension's graduation party guidance (1 to 1.5 pounds of food per guest, protein 6 to 8 ounces) and a 1982 Michigan State bulletin on roast pig barbecues were the only relevant items found, and the University of Minnesota's crowd-cooking material contains no meat quantities at all.
Effect of food variety on intake of a meal: a systematic review and meta-analysis, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2021;113(3):716-741 (Embling, Pink, Gatzemeier, Price, Lee, Wilkinson). MEASURED, peer reviewed, and the reason our sides adjustment is half the size of everyone else's. The widely repeated instruction to cut meat by 20 to 25 percent when serving three or more sides has no published authority behind it: the barbecue calculators that print it cite each other, and the one that explains itself attributes the figure to pitmaster consensus. Every credible operator source says only that sides reduce meat consumption slightly, with no number. This meta-analysis found a small to medium effect of variety on intake, with greater variety associated with INCREASED consumption (Hedges' g = 0.405, 95 percent CI 0.259 to 0.552). Our sides multiplier is therefore EDITORIAL, capped at 10 percent, chosen by the user rather than applied silently, and disclosed on the page as the weakest number here.
Texas Style Smoked Brisket, and A Faux Cambro Can Save Your Butt, Meathead Goldwyn, AmazingRibs.com. REPORTED, and the source of the one portion adjustment on this page that a named authority actually quantifies: a serving is 8 ounces of cooked meat with one main dish and 6 ounces when two or more main courses are offered, which is exactly the 25 percent reduction we apply. Also used for the cook-time position, that meat thickness, cooker temperature and whether you wrap are the main determinants of total cook time (with humidity, air temperature, wind, rain and grade of meat all playing a part), which is why hours per pound is not a real rule; and for holding, where an insulated cooler is documented keeping meat well above 150 degrees F for three hours and a 2 to 4 hour hold is treated as part of the recipe rather than a compromise.
Danger Zone (40 F to 140 F), and FDA Food Code 2022 section 3-501.16, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service; U.S. Food and Drug Administration. MEASURED, and the only figures on this page that are not negotiable. FSIS: bacteria grow most rapidly between 40 and 140 degrees F, doubling in as little as 20 minutes; keep hot food at or above 140 degrees F; never leave food out of refrigeration over 2 hours, or over 1 hour if it is above 90 degrees F. The FDA Food Code, which is what a health inspector actually enforces on a caterer, sets hot holding at 135 degrees F and explicitly permits 130 for roasts cooked under 3-401.11(B), which includes a whole brisket or pork butt. We publish 140 as the number to plan to, because it is the consumer-facing guidance, it is the higher figure, and the error here runs one way. Both are named on the page rather than one being quietly presented as the law.

Frequently asked questions

How much brisket per person?

A third of a pound of cooked brisket per adult, which means buying about two thirds of a pound of raw brisket per person. For 50 guests that is 16.67 pounds of cooked meat, so you buy about 33.5 pounds raw. The doubling is not a safety margin, it is the yield: a packer brisket loses roughly half its weight between the trimming bin and the slicing board, and published figures for it range from 36 percent to 69 percent depending on what exactly is being measured.

How much pulled pork for 50 people?

About 32.5 pounds of raw bone-in pork shoulder, which is 4 Boston butts, and it serves roughly 16.67 pounds of finished pulled pork. Bone-in shoulder yields 0.52 pounds of cooked meat per pound purchased in the USDA Food Buying Guide, and a documented cook came out at 52.8 percent. Buying boneless instead, the yield is 0.60 and you need about 28 pounds. Most guides quote the boneless 60 percent figure for both, which is how people end up 15 percent short.

How much meat do I need for 100 guests?

About 66 pounds of raw meat if you are running brisket and pulled pork, or about 64 pounds spread across four meats including ribs and sausage. Either way it serves 33.33 pounds of cooked meat, a third of a pound each. The total barely moves when you switch between brisket and pork because they lose almost the same fraction. It moves a lot when you add sausage, which is bought cooked and loses almost nothing, or ribs, which are mostly bone.

Why do I need to buy so much more raw meat than I serve?

Because barbecue cooks for a long time at a temperature that renders out fat and drives off moisture, and because you throw away part of what you bought before it ever sees smoke. A 14 pound packer brisket loses 1.5 to 2 pounds of fat in trimming, then the trimmed piece shrinks by about a third in the cook. Bone-in cuts lose more again, since the bone was never food. Purchase to plate, a brisket lands near 50 percent, a bone-in pork butt near 52, spare ribs near 39, a whole chicken near 40, and cooked-ready sausage near 95.

How many ribs per person?

Three to four bones per person when ribs share the plate with other meats, and five to six when ribs are the main event. Baby backs run a little higher because the bones are smaller, so half a rack or about six ribs is the usual figure. For 20 guests with ribs as the only meat, that is about 17.5 pounds of St. Louis cut racks, or 5 racks, which works out to 3.4 bones each. Ribs are counted in bones for a reason: you are buying a lot of weight that nobody eats.

Does it change if there are kids at the barbecue?

Children under about 12 eat roughly half an adult portion, which is what the catering guides say almost word for word. Twenty adults and ten children is 25 adult servings, not 30. One honest caveat: USDA's own child nutrition meal patterns do not support a 50 percent cut, since the school lunch minimums for younger children run about 0.8 of the high school figure and the CACFP pattern is identical for ages 6 to 12 and 13 to 18. Those are nutritional minimums rather than appetite estimates, so we use half and tell you it is a convention.

How much meat per person if there are lots of sides?

A little less, and much less less than you have been told. The figure that circulates online, cut the meat by 20 to 25 percent for three or more sides, traces to barbecue calculators citing each other rather than to any published authority, and every credible operator source says only that sides help slightly without giving a number. The one peer-reviewed study on food variety found the opposite, that more variety on a table is associated with eating more. So this calculator caps the reduction at 10 percent and lets you choose it.

Can I cook the meat ahead, and how do I hold it?

Yes, and you should aim to finish about two hours early rather than on time. Finished barbecue holds for hours wrapped and packed in a dry cooler, while a brisket that stalls with guests already parked cannot be rescued. USDA puts the danger zone at 40 to 140 degrees F, so hold cooked meat at 140 or above, and once it leaves the heat do not let it sit out more than 2 hours, or 1 hour above 90 degrees outside. The long holds pitmasters use, 150 to 160 in a cooler, sit comfortably above every federal line. The risk is in the cooling, not the holding.

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