By 8 a.m. on June 14, Jesse and Lucia Kaufman had already been at the Capital City Farmers Market in Montpelier for 90 minutes. Together, juggling their baby and toddler, they had set up a full outdoor kitchen with two long tables; a small, arched wood-fired oven; and a 6.5-foot-high, custom-welded grill on wheels. The rig’s bottom shelf held neatly stacked, kiln-dried maple with which Jesse, 39, had started a fire in the firebox one rack up.
Every Saturday since the market season’s start, the first-year vendors have lugged from their Plainfield home all the equipment to prep and cook breakfast and lunch. That includes chef knives, hotel pans, a dozen cast-iron skillets, a one-eighth cord of firewood and 20 pounds of ice.
What requires no lugging are 99 percent of their menu ingredients.
“It’s a little chaotic, but it’s beautiful chaos.” Lucia Kaufman
Other than salt, olive oil, lemons, and Vermont-made butter and cider vinegar, the Shepherd’s Hearth sources everything from fellow vendors, right at the market. In fact, except for meat — which the Kaufmans order ahead so that it can be thawed — Jesse doesn’t finalize the menu until he sees what farmers have brought that week.
“It’s a little chaotic, but it’s beautiful chaos,” said Lucia, 29.
Every Saturday, their market menu is about as pure an expression of farm-to-table — or, more accurately, farm-to-compostable takeout container — as it gets. On June 14, it included a duck egg frittata with bacon-leek sausage ($18); smashed, Greek-style beef meatballs with roasted carrots ($18); miso-maple chicken drumsticks with bok choy ($14); and spring salad ($9).
With an hour to go before the market officially opened, Lucia popped the kids into a wagon, slung a basket over her arm and headed out to procure ingredients on her husband’s list. As she passed the co-owners of Northfield’s Union Brook Farm setting up their stand, Lucia called out, “We’ll be back around once you’re settled.”
From LePage Farm of Barre, Lucia picked up onions and cucumbers; from Schoolhouse Farm of East Calais, drumsticks and ground beef; and from Breadseed Farm and Fusda Farm, both of Craftsbury, radishes, boy choy, scallions and cherry tomatoes.
At Northfield’s Field Stone Farm, Lucia grabbed mixed greens and chatted with farmer Hannah Blackmer, who said, “Jesse mentioned fennel, I think?”
Blackmer, whose farm also makes wood-fired pizza, said she was thrilled to see the Shepherd’s Hearth at the market.
“I love food cooked with fire,” Blackmer said, “and I love seeing what people create with our ingredients in real time.”
“You work too hard,” Blackmer’s helper, Daniel Booth, joked to Lucia.
“It’s a passion project,” she responded with a laugh. “We’re in good company.”
The Montpelier market offers an exceptional variety of farmers and food producers, Lucia said as she pulled her kids and her haul back to the Shepherd’s Hearth spot at the rear of the 133 State Street parking lot.
“We are trying to use everyone,” she said. “The best part is working with all these really great people.”
With the assistance of Rachelle Rodriguez and Lucia Rosenast, Jesse had started chopping, slicing and dicing vegetables. He threaded chicken drumsticks on two long, swordlike skewers; set them across the fourth level of the grill, about 30 inches above the fire; and anointed them with olive oil and salt.
His wife popped a few stalls over for some Red Hen Baking bread from Middlesex and a quart of fromage blanc from Chelsea’s Fern River Farm.
Jesse opened the jar and took a deep whiff of the creamy, sweet aroma. “It’s like a crème fraîche vibe,” he said. Her basket back on her arm, Lucia procured another quart before circling back to Union Brook for duck eggs and sausage for the breakfast frittata.
Like many vendors, the farm’s married co-owners, Rose Thackeray and Em Virzi, generally trade at least some of the value of their ingredients for lunch from the Shepherd’s Hearth.
All the meals have been delicious, they said. Even grilled chicken hearts were “surprisingly delightful,” Virzi said. “‘Give me more chicken hearts’ is not what I normally say when someone feeds me chicken hearts.”
When Thackeray, a market board member, learned about the Shepherd’s Hearth’s intention to source and cook their menu from scratch over wood at the market this year, she said, “It was really cool to have a [vendor] applicant with that ethos.”
Not every market welcomed their open-fire cooking pitch with similar excitement, Jesse said. He credited Capital City Farmers Market manager Keri Ryan with being especially supportive and also sensitive to the impact the smoke might have on neighboring vendors.
In Brazil, where Jesse learned the art of cooking over fire, no one would have batted an eye. He landed there at 19 after leaving college in Iowa to follow his then-girlfriend, an exchange student, home.
“Churrasco is just what you do on a weekly basis. It’s a way of life,” he said, using the Portuguese word for open-fire cooking, usually of meat. “At a college party, there’d be like, not kidding you, 50 full beef rib racks stuck on swords in the ground along a 100-foot-long fire. It was just what you did instead of a pizza party.”
Jesse went on to spend 14 years in the southern region of Brazil, where the practice has especially deep roots.
“In the gaucho tradition,” Jesse said, “cowboys used to carry swords on their long journeys. They would slaughter an animal and cook it on a sword near the fire while they were herding or tending to the flock.”
While in Brazil, Jesse became a fire keeper for sweat lodges and ayahuasca ceremonies. Ayahuasca, an Indigenous plant medicine with powerful psychoactive effects, has been used for centuries in the Amazon region, though it is illegal in the U.S. Jesse dove deep into ayahuasca and the surrounding spiritual practices, studying with a shaman until, he said, “One fateful day, my mind cracked, and I went into psychosis for two years.”
Desperately seeking a way out of what he described as “demonic oppression,” Jesse returned to the U.S. At his mother’s home in central Florida, he turned her backyard into a food forest with native and pollinator-friendly plants. Working in the soil, he said, was literally grounding: “I just needed to come back to Earth.”
Jesse decided to pursue farming and enrolled in a tropical agroforestry program on the Big Island of Hawaii, where he met Lucia. She had farmed in Maine but was from Connecticut. They returned to New England when her mother became ill, and Jesse worked for Heirloom Fire, a Massachusetts caterer known for cooking over fire.
The couple were living at highway rest areas in a mobile tiny cabin when they decided to move to the Green Mountain State in 2021. “We always kind of wanted to go to Vermont,” Jesse said, noting that his mom’s family were French Canadian Vermonters. “Maybe it’s in my bones. Maybe it was the mountains. It felt like a calling.”
They worked on several different farms, and Jesse spent two seasons with the Hindquarter, a Huntington caterer that specializes in open-flame cooking, before deciding to establish their own culinary-focused event business.
The Montpelier market was a first step. The Shepherd’s Hearth occasionally pops up at the Royalton and Stowe markets and has just secured a commercial catering license. Later this summer, the Kaufmans are planning a picnic series for which they hope to partner with farmers around Vermont on similar impromptu, seasonal menus.
On June 14, the Shepherd’s Hearth ethos meant that the Greek meatballs lacked oregano. Lucia had checked with every farm and returned empty-handed, though there was plenty of dill, parsley, mint, cilantro, chives and fennel fronds.
All other ingredients corralled, she crouched, baby on her hip, to write the menu on the blackboard. Chicken fat from the slowly bronzing drumsticks dripped into the fire. Jesse filled a pan with whole, unpeeled carrots and added fat knobs of butter before starting them in the small oven. Ash floated around the rig like dusty snowflakes. A few landed on the brim of his well-worn beaver-felt cowboy hat, embroidered with flowers by his wife.
Just after 9 a.m. the first frittatas headed into the oven, and slices of generously buttered bread went on the griddle, or plancha, above the fire. Before being served, each golden-yellow puff was crowned with a scoop of herby cherry tomatoes, a dollop of fromage blanc, fennel fronds and chive blossoms.
Brittany and Josh Short of Northfield stood with their toddler, watching the outdoor kitchen dance with appreciation and anticipation. “It’s like old-school cowboy cooking,” Josh said.
Asked if $18 seemed steep for breakfast, Brittany said, “I expected nothing less. I like that they buy all of their ingredients here and then decide what to make.” She appreciated, she said, that the eggs and sausage in her breakfast were raised by her neighbors at Union Brook Farm.
“It helps everyone here,” added Josh, whose review upon his first bite was, “Oh, man!”
Many marketgoers paused as they strolled along, caught by the action and aromas. “It smells so damn good,” said Jan Thouron of Middlesex.
Jesse juggled pans of carrots, snap peas and radishes on the griddle, a portrait of a June harvest in burnished orange, spring green, and pink and white. Cooked with just butter, salt and fire, their sweet, earthy and sharp flavors sang in the lunch dishes.
A little later, Mike Tarrant of Montpelier’s Umamiso waited for his order — his wife, Yoko, had made the miso that glazed the drumsticks. His past Shepherd’s Hearth’s meals reminded him of Hen of the Wood, the high-end Waterbury and Burlington restaurants, Tarrant said: “It’s so surprising to get that flavor profile here.”
“The farmers make it easy,” Jesse said. “The reason we don’t cook with any seasonings is because we want people to taste the farming.”
The Shepherd’s Hearth will not be at the Capital City Farmers Market on June 28 but will return on July 5, 12 and 19 and monthly from August through October. Check theshepherdshearth.com for other public event dates.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Food Over Fire | At the Capital City Farmers Market, the Shepherd’s Hearth sources and cooks a farm-fresh, wood-fired menu”
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.
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