Meathead Goldwyn

Craig “Meathead” Goldwyn (born 1949) came to BBQ sideways. He studied journalism and photography at the University of Florida, earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and spent a long first career in wine — founding the Beverage Testing Institute, lecturing for over a decade at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, and teaching as an adjunct professor at Le Cordon Bleu Chicago. His father, who owned a butcher shop and worked as a USDA inspector, planted the early interest in meat.

He founded AmazingRibs.com in 2005 in response to a rib cook-off challenge from a neighbor. Two decades later the site is the largest BBQ destination by traffic — more than 2,000 free pages of tested recipes, food-science explainers, and gear reviews — anchored by the AmazingRibs Pitmaster Club, described as the world’s largest membership-based BBQ and grilling community. He still publishes from a kitchen in suburban Brookfield, Illinois.

In 2016 he co-authored Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling with physicist Greg Blonder — a NYT bestseller named to Southern Living’s “100 Best Cookbooks of All Time,” Serious Eats’ “22 Essential Cookbooks for Every Kitchen,” and Best-of-2016 lists at the Chicago Tribune, BBC, Wired, Epicurious, and Leite’s Culinaria. In 2021 he was inducted as the 40th member of the Barbecue Hall of Fame — only the second Chicago-area inductee, after James Lemons of Lem’s Bar-B-Q.

BBQ as applied food science. Meathead’s partnership with Greg Blonder — a former Bell Labs chief technical advisor turned Boston University physicist — turned AmazingRibs into the one BBQ site that runs original experiments rather than repeating received wisdom. Thermocouples in muscle. Lab-bench measurements of evaporation rates. Controlled tests of smoke chemistry. The site reads like a kitchen cookbook and a methods section spliced together.

Myth-busting. The big three pieces of canonical Meathead research all reframed how a generation of cooks thinks about barbecue. The stall is evaporative cooling, not stalled collagen conversion. The smoke ring is a nitric-oxide reaction with myoglobin and can be faked without any smoke at all. The Texas crutch works because foil and butcher paper interrupt the evaporation that powers the stall — physics, not superstition.

Independent gear testing. The AmazingRibs reviews are the closest thing the BBQ world has to a Consumer Reports — published with testing methodology, no paid placements, and ratings that don’t move when manufacturers call. The Best Value, Platinum, and Gold Medal lists drive real purchasing decisions across the home-cook market.

Meathead’s signature posture is science-first, myth-busting, evidence-based. When tradition says one thing and the thermocouple says another, he goes with the thermocouple — and shows the data. That stance has reframed core BBQ vocabulary (the stall is evaporative cooling; the smoke ring is a chemistry reaction; bark is Maillard plus polymerization plus evaporation) and made AmazingRibs the reference everyone else cites.

He doesn’t sell rubs, sauces, or branded merchandise. He’s not a competition pitmaster or restaurant operator. He’s a writer and publisher — the dean of American BBQ writing — and his independence from the gear-and-sauce economy is part of what makes the gear reviews and myth-busts carry the weight they do.

The voice on the site is generous and slightly vaudevillian (“Hedonism Evangelist and BBQ Whisperer” sits under his byline) but the underlying claims are rigorous. The Blonder collaboration is the engine: Meathead frames the question, Blonder runs the test, and the site publishes the result with the methodology in plain sight. It’s the closest thing American BBQ has to peer review.

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