Luis Ramirez

Luis Ramirez is a pitmaster who founded BBQ Junkie in 2005 and competed across Southern California with the barbecue team Four-Q. He’s been cooking over live fire for more than thirty years. He learned fire from his father. Every house the family lived in got a pit dug into the yard, brick-lined and permanent, and it came out for the big cookouts. Not a grill, not a smoker. A hole in the ground you load with fire, let burn down to coals, then fill with the food nothing else can handle. Whole turkeys. Huge cuts of meat. Cow heads. Seal it, walk away, and hours later open it up in front of everybody. That pit is still the thing he measures every cook against. The food goes back further than the fire. Luis grew up in Santa Paula, in the heart of the 805, around his father’s citrus and avocado nursery. That produce still runs through this site: citrus in the marinades and the drinks, avocados wherever they belong. It’s why BBQ Junkie was never just smoke. The sides, the salads, the sauces, and everything else that turns a cook into a meal get the same attention as the meat. Four-Q came together out of the food-blogging world. Luis, Big Mista, Sylvie, and Professor Salt had never met before the team formed, and they went on to compete all over Southern California. Competition is where most of what shows up here got sharpened: cooking to a clock, tasting critically, and caring more about one bite in a stranger’s mouth than a whole plate in your own. Tri tip runs deep enough in that 805 upbringing that it got its own site: BBQ Junkie’s companion, BBQ Tri Tip, devoted entirely to the cut. When he isn’t tending a fire, Luis runs Cast Iron LA, a digital marketing agency in Los Angeles.

Luis also publishes BBQ Tri Tip and his personal site at luisramirez.org.

42 articles published

Recipes

Blog Posts

BBQ Joint Reviews