Justin Walker’s Brown Bread

It’s the nature of a top chef like Justin Walker to be a hard worker. But he and his wife and business partner, Danielle Johnson Walker, take the Yankee work ethic to the limit. Consider that in addition to running Walkers Maine, their fine-dining restaurant in Cape Neddick, Maine, and raising their son, Jackson, they also manage a farm that has been in Danielle’s family for two centuries, where they grow vegetables and care for a menagerie of horses, goats, chickens, and other animals.

Consider also that on the day the Weekends with Yankee crew arrived at the farm to film a classic Maine bean-hole supper, the couple had just returned from cooking at a charity dinner in Manhattan. And yet there was Justin, digging a pit deep enough to sink a cast-iron pot that Danielle had sourced from a local antiques shop. He built a fire in the pit, let the wood burn down to coals, added stones to conduct the fire’s heat, then laid the pot in the pit and sealed it before covering it with a layer of dirt and a tarp, as has been done at Maine lumber camps since the 1800s.

Justin put his own spin on the bean-hole dinner menu, adding fire-roasted pumpkin and corn (a nod to the staple foods of the region’s indigenous people), cedar -plank salmon, and a delicious loaf of steamed brown bread with salted butter. You can find recipes for bean-hole beans on our site, and Justin was kind enough to share his brown bread recipe below. —Amy Traverso