Filipino and Cajun touches flavor Tony Ramirez's barbecue recipes

Cooking over live fire is one of humanity’s oldest culinary traditions. Nearly all of us come from a culture where meat is bathed or rubbed with ingredients that carry flavor. Each summer, many of us stand over the fire carrying on family traditions but some of us like to expand our repertoire. This year, we've been inspired by social media phenom Tony Ramirez whose BBQ has caught the imagination of nearly two million TikTok users. His new book is Backyard BBQ with Fire and Spice.

Evan Kleiman: You grew up in the Bay Area, and I understand that barbecue played a role in your family life, with your cousins and hanging out. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Tony Ramirez: We all had a lot of food backgrounds with our parents but none of them ever really cooked in the backyard. As kids growing up, that was just our thing, playing in the backyard, climbing trees. As we got older, I think it was my older cousin that ended up buying a barbecue pit. From there, it was everybody taking turns manning the barbecue pit. The love for barbecue sparked around that time, I would say, when I was in my early teens. 

I love that you say that barbecue is about more than food that it is really kind of like a social life. 

Yes, exactly.

How did barbecue go for you, from just family and friend gatherings to becoming the center of your life, and how did TFTI become your brand?

TFTI stands for "thanks for the invite." That was just an acronym. A lot of my friends would comment on my posts when I would post food stuff. They would say, "thanks for the invite," because I never invited them, that type of thing. Yeah, barbecue has always been in my life. 

But as far as social media, it wasn't until my wife, back in 2020 she would send me TikTok videos of other chefs and their cooking videos. I didn't feel the need to do that. I was working at Meta at the time. I had a really good job, finally just kind of clicked in my head like “I can do this too." 

I played around with it for a little bit and a few months into it, I had a video that went viral on TikTok. I think it was that video that sparked the whole thing for me. 

"Something just clicked," says Tony Ramirez, who was working at Meta before turning to barbecue. Photo by Smoke & Vine LLC.

I'd love to get to the food and the flavor profiles at the center of what you do. Tell us a bit about your mom and your dad and the foods and flavors that they fed you as you were growing up.

My father, he's from the Philippines. He was a cook in the Navy but growing up, he didn't really control the kitchen. That was my mom's domain. She was a stay-at-home mom. She's from Louisiana. Her father was also Filipino, so a lot of the cooking was done by my mom at home, and she would do a lot of Filipino cooks, like chicken adobo pancit. Then she would also have her Cajun recipes, like gumbo, jambalaya, dirty rice, all that stuff. It was just good food all the time at our dinner table.

So these two parts of you, Filipino and Cajun,  do they mix on the barbecue, or do they stay separate?

I've mixed them. One was a Cajun shrimp lumpia before that did pretty well. It was real good. It's real simple. You just season the shrimp with Cajun seasoning. You wrap it up in a lumpia wrapper, and you fry it, then you dip it in vinegar and stuff like that. Like normal lumpias are eaten, but for the most part, I keep them separate. I just throw my little barbecue twist on it.

Let's start with a more direct kind of Filipino influence. What characterizes Filipino barbecue in terms of flavors and ingredients? Also, is there a more direct or indirect cooking style involved? And maybe give us an idea for a recipe we should try first.

For me, Filipino is more of a saltier side with a lot of soy sauce. There's a banana ketchup that Filipinos use a lot in recipes. It's like a sweet ketchup style. It doesn't really taste like banana but that kind of stuff is in a lot of my sauces that I make that are Filipino — a lot of soy sauce, pepper, garlic, that kind of thing. So a bold sweetness, I would say. I did one beef rib adobo. Adobo is normally with pork or chicken, so I marinated some beef ribs in adobo sauce, which is a regular one-to-one ratio of vinegar, soy sauce, and water. It marinated in that for a day, smoked, and then threw in the rest of the adobo, which does the same sauce, cooked down with potatoes, bay leaves, a lot of garlic, peppercorns and, yeah, just a barbecue smoked twist to it.

Your Bistek Tagalog uses Korean, galbi-style thin short ribs. Itt looks like a really simple recipe. Can you describe it? 

Yeah, so that's a real citrusy barbecue. Flavors are there because they use a lot of lemons in there but it's real simple. They normally do it with thin-cut beef but I did it with those Korean-style short ribs. You get a lot more flavor in there because of the bones that are in it. You get the saltiness from the soy sauce, then a lot of citrus shines through in there because of the marinade. Then you just eat that with rice. You just cook that, throw it over rice, and that's it. That's a meal, right there.

Let's talk about Cajun style. Talk to me about the foil boil packs and how you use them.

That's just pretty much a Cajun boil but a personal-size one. You make a little foil pocket, you throw in your seafood, corn, potatoes, then add Cajun seasoning, butter, garlic. You close it up, then toss it on the grill. It's an easy cleanup. Once you're done, you just throw the foil and all the shells away and that's pretty much it. That was more  like a real simple way of doing a seafood boil.

"Backyard BBQ with Fire and Spice" expands traditional grilling repertoire to include Filipino and Cajun flavors. Photo courtesy of Harvard Common Press.

It's kind of genius to me. It's much, much simpler. So talking to you, we need a wing recipe. There are photographs of the wings in the book. I know what I'm going to be eating tonight. You have a whole chapter full. Some are grilled, some are fried. Could you pick one for us?

My favorite is the Cajun honey butter wings. It's also one of the most viral wing recipes that I've done, and it's real simple. I have the ingredients in there to make your own Cajun seasoning. But you can also find some low sodium Cajun seasoning and use that. You definitely want low sodium, because you're going to have it too salty with the amount of seasoning you need to throw in there. But it's just melted butter and garlic, then you top it with hot honey. 

Wow. In that recipe, are you grilling or frying them first? Does it make a difference?

No, not really. I like to grill versus frying. Frying wings, I'll get that when I'm ordering wings, but if I'm cooking them myself, I'm always grilling them. I love the flavor of coals and the open fire flavor. Either way, it's whichever one you prefer. Some people do it in their air fryer. 

I wanted to also ask you about burnt ends. You have so many different recipes that are either actual burnt ends or your take on burnt ends. They take you in a lot of different directions. Which one should we try?

Burnt ends became famous because of brisket burnt ends but I like to do pork belly burnt ends. They're a lot juicier. They're obviously fattier. It's a real good platform to throw whatever flavors at it. To me, that's my favorite burnt ends, the pork belly burnt ends.