Pit Master – Iron Pig BBQ

Grand Champion – 2009 Eastern Carolina BBQ Throw Down

2009 North Carolina State Champion

2009 NC State Governor’s Award

Chris Finney (or “Finney” as most people know him) grew up in the heart of BBQ country just miles from Lexington, NC (BBQ Capital of the World). 

Chris started his BBQ odyssey while still in high school cooking whole hogs on cookers made from old oil drums.  BBQ “cooking school” was staying up all night burning logs to make embers in a burn barrel, and then shoveling the embers into the ‘pit’ to cook with.  He and several friends cooked for keg parties and any other function that asked.  It was all about the camaraderie of friends around the fire.  In the years after high school his cooking friends disbanded and Chris found himself living in Wilmington, NC the summer of 1981 where he learned the ‘art’ of cooking hogs in a pit dug in the sandy coastal soil.  To some it would have seemed as if he was moving backwards in BBQ history but in his mind it was full speed ahead.  His thought on the matter was: “You have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going”.  “Knowing I can cook a hog in a hole means I can cook one in anything. 

Chris married his wife Tricia in 1985 and the cooking moved mostly indoors.  He became a follower of the cooking styles and methods of Jeff Smith (the Frugal Gourmet) and Justin Wilson, honing technique and menu planning.  He and Tricia moved to the Pacific Northwest and then to VA all along cooking together and learning from people and areas they visited.  1997 found them back in their home town and in a new house in 1999.  Chris received a “bullet” smoker as a gift and started BBQing again, although sporadically.  Soon Chris found himself working away from home in the Charleston, SC area with lots of time on his hands when not at work.  BBQ once again took the spotlight and filled that time.

Enter Jack Waiboer~ Chris and Jack first met over the internet (thanks Al Gore) on BBQ forums and then soon met in person and struck up an immediate friendship.  Jack asked Chris to become a member of his already successful “Pigs on the Wing” team and he cooked with the team whenever his schedule allowed.  Luckily the schedule “allowed” when the team won the 2006 SC State Championship, but it has always been about friends and cooking whether winning or not.  As a member of Jack’s new team, “Common Interest”, he continues to cook with his SC friends even now that he has once again returned to his NC roots.  Chris is also the head cook of “Iron Pig BBQ” competition team and he was on the 2007 Pit Masters Cooking School staff, answering questions and helping out students fulfill their course objectives and looks forward to doing the same in 2010.

Bucking traditional cooking thoughts, Chris pioneered the “Reverse Sear” method of cooking.  Traditional thinking has it that you sear a steak or roast (to seal in juices) and then reduce temps to finish cooking but doing research Chris found the opposite to be true.  Searing the meat damages the cell walls and releases moisture, but roasting alone didn’t add a lot of flavor like the searing did.  What about searing after the meat was cooked?  “That’s just crazy talk”… but exactly what he found that you need to do.  For more than 3 yrs Chris tried to get fellow cooks to try his method of cooking steaks and roasts with little success until… Unbeknownst to them, “Cooks Illustrated” and “America’s Test Kitchen” proved out “The Method” in 2007 using an oven and then a cast iron skillet.  And, Alton Brown used basically the same method for cooking rib roasts in the oven.  Now ceramic grill users are finding the benefit of the “Reverse Sear” because it is easier (and faster) to raise the temp in a ceramic cooker than lower it.  In 2007 a Florida newspaper touted the advantages of using “The Finney Method” in an article called “To Sear, or not to Sear”.

Chris is also keeps his brain in BBQ even when not cooking or thinking up recipes as the designer for Superior Smokers based out of FLA and Built in Macon, GA.