Ray Sheehan is a barbecue chef, pitmaster, sauce maker, recipe developer, and two-time cookbook author based in the Garden State. He is the author of award-winning BBQ Sauces and How to Use Them (2020) and Big Green Egg Basics from a Master Barbecuer (2022).
A chef by trade, Ray has spent more than 25 years in the food industry. He is a certified Kansas City Barbeque Society judge, a member of the National Barbecue and Grilling Association, the recipient of over a dozen Awards of Excellence from the NBBQA, and the Grand Champion winner of Sauce King NYC for his Memphis Mop BBQ sauce. Since 2017, he has contributed recipes, feature articles, and product reviews to Barbecue News Magazine.
Ray has traveled widely to cook, study, and experience barbecue firsthand, with time spent in Memphis, Kansas City, and throughout the Southeast. Those experiences inform his approach to barbecue as a regional craft shaped by place, people, and tradition.
He is an active voice in barbecue media, appearing on podcasts and radio shows in the U.S. and abroad, and has been a featured contributor to the Baseball & BBQ Podcast since 2023. In 2025, he was inducted into the Order of the Magic Mop by BBQ Hall of Famer Ardie Davis.
His work has been featured in Tailgater Magazine, The Smoke Sheet, Edible Jersey, New Jersey Monthly, Industry Magazine, and other regional publications. He continues to cook, write, and teach barbecue, with a focus on preserving regional traditions and sharing practical knowledge with cooks at every level.
High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, we’ll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!
Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.
Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please don’t think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.
Post comments and questions below
1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.
2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.
3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.
4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.
5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.
Moderators