Luis Ramirez

Luis Ramirez is a pitmaster who founded BBQ Junkie in 2005 and went on to compete across Southern California with the barbecue team Four-Q. 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 chunks of meat. Cow heads. Seal it, walk away, and hours later open it back up in front of everybody. He’s been cooking over live fire for more than thirty years, and that pit is still the thing he measures against. 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 on this site 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. 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.

44 articles published

Recipes

Blog Posts

BBQ Joint Reviews