Then they called our name!

Modern Stone Age Kitchen had won the Governor's Cup!

We were absolutely thrilled! What an incredible honor and an amazing moment for our entire team and everyone who had helped make it possible. We had poured so much time, energy, creativity, and passion into these seemingly simple little burgers, and to have that work recognized in such a meaningful way was incredibly rewarding. But perhaps what excited us most was that this felt like a victory for something much bigger than Modern Stone Age Kitchen. It was a victory for traditional foodways, local agriculture, and the belief that food made with exceptional ingredients, transformed using time honored techniques, can be both deeply nourishing and absolutely delicious.

The Maryland Department of Agriculture also shared a press release about the 2026 Governor’s Buy Local Cookout, celebrating the event and the Maryland farmers and producers behind it.

There's an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child. As it turns out, it also takes a village to make a really extraordinary burger.

And this is the story of our village and how it all came together to win the Governor's Cup.

The MSAK Team with Governor and Secretary of Agriculture

The Quest for the Perfect Burger

For almost a year, our team at Modern Stone Age Kitchen had been working toward something that might sound relatively simple: creating the perfect burger. But if you know anything about our approach to food, you know that nothing we do is quite that simple. We weren't interested in buying ground beef, commercial hamburger buns, packaged cheese, bacon, pickles, and ketchup and assembling them into a burger. We wanted to make every single component from scratch, using the highest quality ingredients we could find and traditional techniques to transform those ingredients into something as nourishing and delicious as possible.

We had been experimenting with different cuts of beef, grinding our own blends, developing sourdough hamburger buns, making cheese, curing bacon, fermenting pickles, and refining our house made ketchup. So when the 2026 Governor's Buy Local Cookout was announced, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to put everything we had been working on to the test.

The competition required participants to feature and highlight a Maryland ingredient. We decided to take that requirement to the extreme. What if we made a burger in which virtually every ingredient came from Maryland? Not just the beef, but the flour for the bun, milk for the cheese, pork belly for the bacon, tomatoes for the ketchup, cucumbers for the pickles, and fresh vegetables. And what if we could use that burger to celebrate not just Maryland agriculture in general, but the incredible farmers, ingredients, and terroir of our own Eastern Shore?

That was the challenge we set for ourselves.

It Starts with Our Farmers

The first step was identifying the farmers who could provide the ingredients we needed. Fortunately, we've spent years building relationships with some truly extraordinary farmers here on the Eastern Shore. We know the care they put into raising their animals, growing their crops, and producing the raw ingredients that make our work possible.

For the beef, we turned to Roy and Judy Crow of Crow Farm, who raise exceptional cattle. We used their beef to create our carefully developed blend of three different cuts, which we would grind ourselves. For the cheese, we used milk from Nice Farms, which our own Zach transformed into cheddar using traditional cheesemaking techniques. For the bacon, we used pork from Langenfelder, continuing our commitment to whole animal butchery and traditional curing and smoking.

For the ketchup, we sourced beautiful plum tomatoes from Lockbriar Farm. We also used their cucumbers to make our lacto fermented pickles. For the buns, we reached out to Matt Nielsen at Tidewater Organics, who grows incredible organic wheat in Queen Anne's County. And for the fresh lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, we turned to Red Acres.

There was one exception to our all Maryland ingredient goal: the spices. Otherwise, every element of our burger would come from Maryland, and we would transform those ingredients ourselves, entirely from scratch.

I put together our application, included our proposal and all of our farm partners, and submitted it. Several weeks later, we received the exciting news from Kristin Hanna, Senior Director of Marketing at the Maryland Department of Agriculture: We had been selected!

An Unexpected Second Chance

There was just one problem.

The event was originally scheduled for Friday, July 17. As the date approached, Christina and I realized that, despite our enthusiasm and best intentions, there was simply no way we could pull everything together. We were scheduled to fly to Ireland that very evening to begin our annual food tour the following morning. We reluctantly contacted Kristin to explain that we wouldn't be able to participate.

Then something completely unexpected happened. Wildfires in Canada had created hazardous air quality conditions, forcing the Maryland Department of Agriculture to postpone the event. When the new date was announced, Monday, October 5, Kristin reached out to see if we would still be interested.

Our response was immediate. Absolutely!

We were back in! But now the real work began, and we had precious little time to pull it all together.

Bringing Every Ingredient Together

Our first task was to contact all our farmers again to see whether the ingredients we needed would still be available in October. Every single one of them was enthusiastic and ready to help. Fortunately, we already had one very important ingredient underway. Months earlier, Zach had made cheddar cheese using milk from Nice Farms in preparation for the original date. It had been aging ever since. As it turned out, the cheddar would be exactly four months old on the day of the competition. Perfect!

Roy and Judy Crow provided our beef, which we ground ourselves using the blend of three cuts we'd been developing. Billy and I conducted trials to determine the ideal size for our smash burger sliders. We settled on one ounce patties, with two patties per burger. That meant 500 patties for the 250 people we needed to be prepared to serve. So we got to work grinding, scooping, weighing, and portioning 500 individual balls of beef, each weighing one ounce.

Then there were the buns. Matt Nielsen had the organic wheat we needed, but it hadn't yet been milled into flour. He connected me with Ian Yosef at Migrash Farm, who offered to mill the grain for us. Ian did much more than simply mill the wheat. After learning what we were trying to accomplish, he suggested adding some soft wheat to the hard wheat in the sourdough bun formula I had been developing. He was absolutely right. After a few more trials and adjustments, we finally had the sourdough hamburger bun we'd been working toward: flavorful, beautifully textured, and perfectly suited to our little smash burgers.

Now we just needed to make 250 of them.

We ordered every baking ring we could get our hands on in the size we needed, 2⅓ inches in diameter. That gave us 80 rings, which meant we could make 80 perfectly sized buns at a time. It took four rounds of baking over three consecutive days, reusing the rings each time, to produce enough buns.

Meanwhile, the rest of the ingredients were coming together. I milled the plum tomatoes from Lockbriar Farm to remove the skins and seeds, then slowly cooked them down over the course of several days into a thick tomato paste. We used that paste as the foundation for our fermented ketchup, a recipe rooted in one I began developing years ago when our children were little. We sliced and fermented Lockbriar's cucumbers to make our pickles. We cured and smoked our pork bellies to turn them into bacon, continued testing the finished burgers, and refined the amounts and proportions of every ingredient.

Our farmers were delivering exactly what we needed, providing us with extraordinary raw materials. And our team was doing what we do best: using our understanding of traditional food processing techniques to transform those ingredients into food that was as safe, nourishing, bioavailable, and delicious as we knew how to make it.

This is the foundation of everything we do at Modern Stone Age Kitchen. We believe that when we begin with exceptional raw ingredients and apply the knowledge our ancestors developed over thousands of years through fermentation, culturing, curing, aging, sourdough baking, and other traditional techniques, we can create food that nourishes us on a much deeper level. And we don't believe nourishment and deliciousness are competing goals. Quite the opposite. Our bodies and sensory systems evolved over millions of years to help us identify foods that could nourish us and support our survival. Although modern food processing has often disconnected flavor from genuine nourishment, we believe traditional foodways can help bring those things back together.

Our goal wasn't to make a healthy burger that happened to taste good. It was to make an extraordinary burger precisely because of the ingredients we chose and how we transformed them.

The Big Day at Government House

Finally, October 5 arrived. Christina, Zach, Tatyanna, and I loaded up our prepared ingredients, Blackstone griddle, cooking tools, and all the beautiful signage Christina had created, and headed to the Governor's Mansion in Annapolis. We unloaded, set up our station, and about half an hour before the event began, started cooking.

By this point, the process had become a carefully coordinated operation. I'd place about a dozen preportioned balls of beef on the hot griddle, scatter fresh onions over one row, and smash the patties flat. Each received a little salt and pepper. Once the patties had cooked almost all the way through, I'd flip them, season them again, and top each with shreds of our four month aged cheddar. Then I'd stack one cheese topped patty on another, squirt a little water onto the griddle around them, and cover them with a basting dome. The water instantly turned to steam, gently melting the cheese over the beef.

When each double patty was ready, I'd pass it to Zach. He had already sliced and arranged our sourdough buns and topped them with our bacon, lettuce, and tomato. He added the beef, finished each burger with a lacto fermented pickle and a squirt of our fermented ketchup, and secured everything with a Maryland flag toothpick Christina had found for the occasion.

Want to explore what everyone served? The Maryland Department of Agriculture has also published the 2026 Buy Local Cookbook, featuring recipes from the event.

Meanwhile, Christina and Tatyanna were doing something just as important as cooking the burgers: helping people understand why they were special. As people lined up at our station, they explained what made these little sliders so different. They shared where the ingredients came from, introduced people to the farmers who had raised and grown them, and described the traditional techniques we had used to transform those ingredients into the finished burgers. They explained that we had made everything from scratch, from the aged cheddar and sourdough buns to the bacon, fermented ketchup, and lacto fermented pickles. Their conversations helped people understand that what they were about to eat was far more than an ordinary smash burger.

And that mattered enormously to us. Because as much as we wanted people to enjoy the food, we also wanted them to understand and appreciate everything that had gone into creating it. Christina and Tatyanna were making connections between the food, the farmers, the techniques, and the people standing in line. While Zach and I were focused on cooking and assembling the burgers, they were helping communicate the very reason we had undertaken this challenge in the first place.

Years of Work in Every Bite

100% Eat Like a Human Winning Burger! — *100% Locally Sourced Eat Like a Human Burger - Winner of the 2026 Governor’s Buy Local Contest*

It took just a few minutes to make each burger. But it took four months to age the cheese, days to ferment the vegetables and bake the buns, years to develop the recipes, and generations of accumulated knowledge to understand the traditional techniques that made it all possible. And behind every ingredient was a farmer whose own knowledge, skill, and hard work had begun long before we ever stepped into the kitchen.

And that's just the beginning of the story.

It doesn't include the years we spent learning to make cheese using traditional methods. Or the years spent learning to butcher animals, cure and smoke pork bellies, and understand the characteristics of different cuts of meat. Or the countless hours spent studying fermentation and developing our ability to use microorganisms to transform raw ingredients. Or the years I spent refining our ketchup recipe, beginning when our children were little. Or the ongoing development of our sourdough hamburger buns, finally brought to a new level with Ian's help.

And it certainly doesn't include the years spent building relationships with our farmers or the enormous amount of knowledge, skill, labor, and care those farmers and their teams invested in raising their animals, growing their crops, harvesting their products, and getting those ingredients into our hands.

Every single one of those little burgers represented an extraordinary amount of time, effort, knowledge, and human connection. And that's what made them so special.

A Taste of the Eastern Shore

*Our Burger Poster from the Event highlighting all the farms*

We talk a lot about terroir at Modern Stone Age Kitchen. It's a term most people associate with wine, describing how the environment in which grapes are grown influences the character of the finished wine. But terroir isn't limited to wine. It exists in the grasses and forage that nourish our livestock, the soils that produce our wheat, the climate that shapes our tomatoes and cucumbers, and the countless relationships between land, plants, animals, microorganisms, and people.

Our little smash burgers were an expression of that terroir. They weren't simply burgers made with Maryland ingredients. They were an expression of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, interpreted through our approach to food at Modern Stone Age Kitchen. The wheat, the beef, the milk, the pork, the vegetables all came from this place. And through traditional processing techniques, we transformed them into something new while preserving and celebrating their connection to the land and the people who produced them.

But those burgers represented something even bigger than terroir. They represented community. They represented farmers who care deeply about what they produce. They represented a miller who took the time not only to grind our grain but to help us improve our recipe. They represented a kitchen team willing to spend days baking hundreds of buns, fermenting vegetables, making cheese, and preparing every detail. They represented Zach's skill, dedication, and countless hours of preparation, Christina's careful planning and organization, and Christina and Tatyanna's ability to connect with the people we were serving and share the meaning behind the food. They represented our family's involvement, from Billy helping me perfect the patties to the years of feeding our children that inspired recipes we still use today.

A Victory for Our Entire Village

Looking back, what stands out most isn't simply that we won the Governor's Cup. It's everything and everyone that made winning possible. Those little burgers represented years of learning, countless hours of hard work, extraordinary raw materials, traditional foodways, and the collective knowledge, skill, passion, and dedication of an entire community of people who care deeply about what they do. All brought together in one little burger.

And that's what makes this award so meaningful to us. It wasn't simply recognition of a delicious burger. To us, it was recognition of an approach to food that we've devoted our lives to understanding, practicing, and sharing. It demonstrated that traditional foodways aren't simply relics of the past to be studied or preserved. They are living traditions that have enormous relevance today and can help us create a healthier, more nourishing, and more delicious future.

It was also a celebration of the Eastern Shore and the remarkable people who make this place so special. From the farmers raising our beef and pig, to the farmers growing our vegetables and wheat, from the cheesemaking and baking to the final moments on the griddle, every contribution mattered. None of us could have accomplished this alone.

At Modern Stone Age, our mission has always been about much more than simply serving food. We want to help people reconnect with where their food comes from, understand how it can be transformed, and appreciate the extraordinary relationships between nourishment, flavor, land, tradition, and community.

We are incredibly grateful to the Maryland Department of Agriculture for creating this opportunity, to Kristin Hanna for helping make our participation possible, to every farmer and producer who contributed, and to our extraordinary team for bringing it all together.

And to everyone who tasted one of our little burgers that day: thank you.

We hope you tasted more than a really good smash burger. We hope you tasted the Eastern Shore, the work of many hands, and the power of a community coming together around food.

It takes a village to make something extraordinary. And we couldn't be more proud or grateful to be part of this one.