Bobbyrey Delgado: Si Quema BBQ Pitmaster and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

Bobbyrey Delgado was the youngest pitmaster on the road to Las Vegas when he qualified in February, and he got there the hard way, by building a barbecue team out of nothing in a high school that did not even have a kitchen.

He is twenty years old.

He will be twenty-one by the time he cooks for $1,000,000 next April, old enough to walk the Vegas floor and take the whole thing in, which is the part he is most excited about.

The rest of the field arrives with decades of trophies. Delgado arrives with about four years of cooking, a Reserve Grand Champion finish, and a way of talking about barbecue that sounds less like a hobby than a calling he cannot shake.

How Bobbyrey Delgado Got Into Barbecue in the Rio Grande Valley

Barbecue found him the way it finds a lot of kids, at the edge of a family gathering. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving of his childhood, the Delgados drove down to the ranch in the Rio Grande Valley, where his dad was born and raised and where most of the family still lives.

Someone was always cooking. His grandfather and his father ran the pits for the whole clan, and Bobbyrey grew up in the smoke, picking up tongs before he really understood what to do with them.

For a while it was just background noise. When his parents started competing seriously during his middle-school years, he found the whole thing boring, right up until the day he entered a kids' cook and came home with a third-place finish.

That was the hook.

He wanted to keep cooking, and he never really stopped.

His first strong category was chicken, the protein his family always cooked, leg quarters and halves over an open fire.

It was fast, it was forgiving, and it was what he knew. The longer he cooked, the more he fell for the hard one.

Brisket is his favorite now, the big monster cut that scares a lot of people off, and he has it dialed in well enough that a giant first-place brisket check hangs on the wall behind him.

He talks about the cut the way older cooks do, with respect, as a thing you never fully master and keep chasing anyway.

How Bobbyrey Delgado Started a High School BBQ Team With No Kitchen

The part of his story that sets him apart is what he pulled off in high school. Most young cooks come up through a school culinary program.

Delgado's school did not have one. He was in the agriculture department learning to weld when he decided he wanted a barbecue team of his own.

A sister school already had one, bankrolled through its culinary budget, but on his side there was no money and no easy yes.

The school would not fund it, so he and his teammates raised it themselves, leaning on parents and students and running their own fundraisers until the teachers could get the program approved.

It went through his junior year. By his senior year the team had a trailer and a reputation, and Delgado was the one coaching teammates who had never touched a smoker, because none of them had grown up in it the way he had.

Somewhere in the middle of building that team, his dad pointed him toward a real contest, a big open cook-off thirty minutes down the road.

Delgado wanted to run it himself. His parents stood beside him, but the cook was his, his first true solo, and he was still a junior in high school.

He took Reserve Grand Champion.

He says he will never forget the moment, and it told him everything he needed to know about what he wanted to do with his life.

What Si Quema BBQ Means: The Story Behind the Team Name

The team is Si Quema BBQ, a name that is a joke on itself, and the punchline is stitched right onto his cap.

Quema is Spanish for "it burns," so a team called Si Quema reads, on paper, like a crew that scorches its meat.

Underneath, the hat answers back: no quema, cuh. It doesn't burn, cuh, "cuh" being the South Texas slang his barbecue family hung on him years ago.

It is a two-line bilingual wink, the kind of misleading name that makes a judge grin before the food even lands, and the banners behind him settle the argument about whether the meat comes off right.

His mom turned the joke into a rallying cry. When the smoke is rolling and the brisket is tender, the call in their corner is simple.

¡Si Quema!

Senior year was the year he went all in. His parents set their own competing aside so the season could belong to him, and he cooked hard, somewhere between fifteen and thirty times, learning the ins and outs and building the network of barbecue brothers and uncles who would carry him.

Then high school ended and the real world arrived, with its bills and its slower pace, and the cooking eased off the way it does for a young man figuring out adulthood.

The ambition did not shrink, though. He still wants to chase points one day, the grind of cooking nearly every weekend across a season and finishing in the top ten enough to earn the respect and the bragging rights.

It is, as he freely admits, a very expensive hobby.

He wants to be young and go do it anyway.

How Bobbyrey Delgado Qualified for the BBQ World Cup at Smokin' on the Rio

The win that put him on the road to Vegas came in February at Smokin' on the Rio, the big cook-off in Mercedes, in the same Rio Grande Valley his family comes from.

It meant far more than a trophy.

That week he had gotten the news that his godmother was fighting a serious cancer, and it sat on him the whole drive down.

He told his mom he wanted to win it for her. He had a feeling about that Saturday, and the feeling was right.

He took Reserve Grand Champion and punched one of the first tickets to the BBQ World Cup. His godfather was there, and their kids, and friends who had driven down from San Antonio, and family from all over the Valley.

When his song played and his name came over the speakers, the emotions got the best of him.

He is not going to pretend otherwise.

Bobbyrey Delgado's Team: His Mom Mary, His Mentors and His Plan for $1,000,000

For all the mentors in his corner, the center of the team is his mom. Mary is his teammate, the one standing next to him at every cook-off, and he calls her his best friend without a flicker of teenage embarrassment about it.

She is the momager and the chief of staff, and she was the one who noticed early, back when he was coaching his high-school teammates, that this was more than a phase.

She will be on the crew in Las Vegas.

When Shannon Pruitt asked what he would do first if his name got called on the World Cup stage, he did not reach for anything clever.

He would hug his mom.

The circle around him runs deep from there. There is Kevin Hernandez, a mentor he calls another barbecue dad, close enough to be a phone call away.

There are Josh and Stacey Hale of Shirt Shop BBQ and CB Barbosa of Dirty Smoke BBQ, the people he says his family sees more than their own relatives out on the competition trail.

And there is Uncle Bill of Chicken Fried BBQ, his ride-or-die, the man Delgado names without hesitation when you ask him who the greatest of all time is.

When Bill took third overall at Smokin' on the Rio, he was walking back from the stage as Delgado was walking up to it, and the two of them met in the middle for a hug.

Two people he wishes could see all this are already gone: a great-grandfather he never met but is told he takes after, right down to the attitude, and his great-grandmother, Grandma B, his dad's number-one fan, who passed a few years back.

He figures they will be riding on his shoulders at the pit, nudging his boxes toward the right judges.

Ask him what he would do with the money and he sounds older than twenty. He wants to invest it, buy into a couple of businesses, make it last, the kind of answer that made Shannon say she was proud of him the way a mother would be.

Then he wants to open a restaurant. He has a spot in mind, down in the Valley, out on the island where there is no real barbecue joint, and he already knows the signature dish.

It is a green chili brisket burrito, brisket for his favorite protein and green chili for his New Mexico roots, built off a recipe his mom makes only on rare occasions.

He and Mary will cook it together in Vegas the way they cook everything, nervous and excited in equal measure, one of the youngest teams in a field of a hundred, chasing $1,000,000 and carrying a whole Valley with them.

When they call Si Quema BBQ to the stage, the call in their corner will be exactly what it has always been.

¡Si Quema!

Sources

Bobbyrey Delgado and Mary Delgado, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker: Reserve Grand Champion, Smokin' on the Rio (team #26, Si Quema BBQ, San Antonio, Texas). BBQ United team profile (member-written bio and story: Si Quema BBQ, founded 2022, KCBS / CBA / IBCA).

Smokin' on the Rio BBQ Cook-Off, Mercedes, Texas.

Meet the Field: Every Team Qualified for the BBQ World Cup, BBQ United.