Barbecue has long been portrayed as a guy thingone of the manliest of manly pursuits.
By teaching and mentoring aspiring cooks, they’re helping to groom the next generation of entrepreneurs.
And these women are right back there in the soot and smoke of the pit house too.
Credit: Wyatt McSpadden
They’re stoking the fires, shoveling coals, and tending the meat as it cooks.
Amy Mills of 17th Street Barbecue agrees.
“The men do overshadow,” she admits.
Credit: Ken Goodman
“I’m kind of saying that as a fact.
Here are nine who are making their marks on Southern culture.
She helped turn that reputation into a restaurant, two cookbooks, and a catering-and-events operation.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
“You have to be able to do it all,” she advises.
Ultimately, what she finds most rewarding is helping expand the barbecue community while keeping long-running traditions alive.
“I’m thrilled to be taking on a family legacy,” she says.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
“It’s such an honor to be part of that.”
“I need a lot of life.”
And she’s found plenty of it in the world of barbecue.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
“We showcased real places and told real stories, and it was never scripted,” she says.
“I like the integrity of that.”
Bennett has a passion for sharing the techniques and traditions of barbecue cooking.
Credit: Robert Jacob Lerma
She teaches more than 50 classes a year for corporate clients like Traeger, a manufacturer of pellet grills.
The majority of her students are still men, but that’s starting to change.
Now, my classes will have five, six, or even 10 women.”
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
If Diva Q has her way, those numbers will continue to grow.
Their older brother Daniel eventually bought the business and renamed it Jones Bar-B-Q.
If she wants to take a vacation, the restaurant closes up.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
This is truly a one-woman show.
A few months afterward, he decided to retire and asked her if she wanted to take over.
Some 20-plus years later, she’s still at it.
She makes the sauces, coleslaw, potato salad, and beans from scratch.
Her old-fashioned wood-cooked barbecue keeps them coming back for more.
“I just kind of started doing it and fell in love with it,” she says.
Not all of the men working the pits were thrilled to have a woman in charge, Loomis admits.
Her journey into professional barbecue started with an explosionthe Bacon Explosion, to be precise.
She won her initial showdown and earned a slot in the finale.
“I took down all the pitmasters, but those two trained chefs got me,” she says.
TheChoppedepisodes aired in August 2017, and her life has been crazy ever since.
Melissa Cookston
Memphis Barbecue CompanyHorn Lake, MS
Melissa Cookston likes to stay busy.
“He made the mistake of taking me to a barbecue contest,” Cookston says.
“It totally appealed to my competition-junkie self.”
If we didn’t win the contest, we didn’t eat."
Seven world championships followed, earning Cookston the title of the “Winningest Woman in Barbecue.”
These days, Cookston is raising her own hogs too.
That’s going whole hog indeed.
One day, when a pit hand didn’t show up, Tootsie stepped in.
Soon, she was cooking six days a week.
During the week, Tootsie still works for the local school district’s maintenance department in Giddings.
Most modern Central Texas barbecue is slow-cooked on offset smokers over indirect heat.
She carries shovelfuls of glowing coals from the firebox to each pit and scatters them beneath the cooking meat.
After all, there’s still work to be done.
