Vermont shrimp farm: Sweet Sound Aquaculture supplies Hen of the Wood - Burlington Free Press

I sat on a Thursday night at Hen of the Wood in Burlington, in front of an appetizer tempting me with its striking good looks.

I was ready to do something I had never done before at a restaurant — eat food that I had watched being harvested from the farm that day. This dish would go from farm to table to mouth in mere hours.

The strangest part was that this wasn't lettuce or beans or kale. This was shrimp.

No, wait, the strangest part is this: The shrimp came from Vermont.

How does shrimp, a crustacean that thrives in salt water, come from Vermont? This is a state that has the mountains mentioned in "God Bless America" but not a whit of those oceans white with foam.

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John Brawley used to farm oysters in Massachusetts, one of those foamy-white states. He gave that up four years ago to move to Vermont and tackle a new salty enterprise, shrimp-rearing.

Brawley set up eight saltwater tanks in a former dairy barn in Charlotte, where he raises Pacific white leg shrimp by the thousands. Those shrimp show up in bisque Brawley sells at the farm or in local stores. They arrive head-on and shell-on in restaurants such as Hen of the Wood, where on this night the shrimp appeared, tantalizingly, on the very plate in sight of my hungry eyes.

From oysters to shrimp

I met Brawley a week before my Hen of the Wood dinner, at his shrimp operation at Earthkeep Farmcommon, the name bestowed to a large-scale agricultural incubator run by Vermont agricultural entrepreneur Will Raap. The site that will house numerous farm-related startups occupies space at the former Nordic Farms. That's the sprawling dairy operation led by the Hinsdale family before the property was converted for its current use in 2019.

Brawley's first immersion in the Green Mountain State came as a student at the University of Vermont, where the Westport, Connecticut, native graduated in 1988. He then earned a master's degree at Boston University and a doctorate in marine systems ecology from the University of Maryland.

He moved to Duxbury, Massachusetts, for consulting work. While there he decided to start his own business, Sweet Sound Oysters, and farmed shellfish for 15 years.

He wanted to return to Vermont, and he and his girlfriend decided to make the leap. He made connections throughout Vermont by bringing his oysters to the state for events held in conjunction with renowned food purveyors, including Northeast Kingdom stalwarts Hill Farmstead Brewery, Jasper Hill cheese and Caledonia Spirits.

"They were psyched," he said of his move to Vermont. "They were happy to support me."

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Brawley arrived at what's now Earthkeep Farmcommon in late 2018, when dairy cows still occupied the space his shrimp tanks now fill. Instead of oysters, Brawley had a new idea in mind: raising shrimp in the decidedly ocean-less state of Vermont. He rebranded Sweet Sound Oysters into Sweet Sound Aquaculture.

The geography didn't discourage him.

"I knew that I had a pretty good chance of making it work," said Brawley, who has put together shellfish hatcheries in Massachusetts and Zanzibar, Tanzania.

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How do you grow shrimp in Vermont

Brawley knew how circulating indoor saltwater systems work. He visited some that were already operating in inland states such as Indiana, where a soy and pig farm transitioned into a shrimp farm. He checked out Kentucky State University, which he said is at the leading edge of indoor shrimp aquaculture.

Brawley infuses Vermont water with Atlantic sea salt to create a saline home for his shrimp. He acquires post-larval shrimp from a hatchery on Pine Island, Florida — "They're about the size of an eyelash," according to Brawley — and raises them in tanks with a water temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit, giving his indoor operation a perpetually tropical feel.

Because salt water can't be discharged into wastewater systems, Brawley recycles the water using a method known as biofloc. Biofloc systems convert wastes into a food source to keep the shrimp thriving.

There are more than 100 U.S. shrimp farms, according to Brawley, but they still make up a small portion of the overall shrimp market. He said about 95% of shrimp in the U.S. come from overseas. That leaves 5% to be produced in the U.S., but of that 5%, Brawley said only 1-2% come from shrimp farms rather than the wild.

About 1.2 billion pounds of shrimp are consumed in the U.S. each year, according to Brawley. He described his shrimp as "sweet and buttery," and when they're cooked as intended with the shell and head intact it creates an entirely different flavor than what consumers might get from huge commercial operations.

"You get the essence of the whole animal," he said.

Brawley almost lost everything Jan. 14. A brownout hit the farm, and because it was only an ebb in power supply and not a complete outage his automatic alert system didn't recognize what was happening and the backup generator didn't kick in.

"I came here that morning and everything was dead," said Brawley, who estimates he lost more than 600 pounds of market-ready shrimp and 50,000 baby shrimp at a cost of $50,000. Cleaning the system out was hard, cold work, and Brawley was despondent for about an hour. Then he said, "I've got to rebuild this. I have no choice."

He got Sweet Sound Aquaculture back up and running in time for the opening of the Burlington Farmers Market season in May. Brawley sells his shrimp raw and in bisque form at farmers markets, local stores and the weekly Thursday Farm Night at Earthkeep Farmcommon.

Customers often ask Brawley, "Shrimp in Vermont?" Some, he said, assume they're from Lake Champlain, or grown on the Gulf Coast and shipped to Vermont.

"My answer is, 'It's from a former dairy barn in Charlotte,'" Brawley said.

A trek to Hen of the Wood, Burlington

I revisited that former dairy barn a week later to watch as part of my dinner was harvested.

Brawley — wearing the same Sweet Sound Oysters T-shirt he wore when I met him a week earlier — swept one of his tanks with a net to gather shrimp. I asked if his shrimp were happy.

"I think they're happy," Brawley said. When he wants to check their growth or health he does a delicate sweep of the tank and leaves the base of the net sagging in the water while he looks at them. Stressed shrimp can become cannibalistic when feeling pressured, Brawley said. (Apparently, even shrimp think shrimp taste good.)

One five-pound bag of shrimp was already on ice in a cooler by the time I got to the farm. I watched Brawley scoop nets into a tank to pull out enough shrimp for another five-pound bag. He placed a small bucket on a digital scale to weigh his catch, though he said he always adds a little extra, baker's-dozen-style, to his orders.

Brawley loaded the cooler into the bed of his pickup truck, and we drove off separately toward Hen of the Wood a little before noon. On the way we hit some of the most-horrendous traffic either of us had seen on the snarl that is Shelburne Road.

"Worst traffic ever" he texted me at 12:36 p.m. "I'm still crawling by the Olive Garden."

"Awful," I replied. "I'm near Lowe's."

We finally met up in front of the restaurant on Cherry Street around 12:50 p.m., nearly an hour after leaving for what we thought would be less than a half-hour drive. I was worried the ice the bags of shrimp rested upon wouldn't hold up on this warm day, but Brawley reported that the ice and shrimp were doing fine.

Clutching the two foot-long bags filled with shrimp, Brawley wended through the restaurant's dining room into the kitchen. He handed his crop to prep cook Danica Van Sickle, who brought the bags into a walk-in cooler for safe keeping until dinnertime.

Soft-shell-shrimp appetizer

I arrived for my 8:30 p.m. dinner reservation and soon headed back to the kitchen. Line cook John Langdon was preparing my appetizer, a soft-shell-shrimp dish served with aioli, pickled shallots, cherry tomatoes and seared green beans. (Chef Jordan Ware told me, to my surprise, that the delicate aioli was made from smoked bluefish and garlic oil.) I watched Langdon coat the shrimp in a mix of flour, salt and pepper, then place them in a deep fryer for less than two minutes.

He salted them, then put three shrimp on a plate with the other ingredients. With the shell still on, Langdon said, the dish would take on the texture of fried soft-shell blue crab.

Back at the table, I took photos of my dish and contemplated how, a few hours earlier, I watched these shrimp leave the farm they were raised on. Granted, I can't be sure I closely examined each of this trio of shrimp — you can't exactly put ID tags on their ears (Do shrimp even have ears?). I do know they were among the 10 pounds of shrimp I watched Brawley gather and deliver at midday.

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The first shrimp resisted as I cut into it, the shell emitting a light crunch as I dug in with knife and fork. We're so used to eating shrimp sans shell, so that unexpected quality heightened my expectations. (The head remained in place, but because the shrimp was cloaked beneath a coat of breading it didn't feel like it was staring back at me.)

This had a softer mouth feel than that firm, muscular overseas shrimp we're so accustomed to, with slightly brinier, more-nuanced tones. The aioli provided a complementary light garlicky taste, with the vegetables echoing the mild crunch of the shrimp as they accented the flavors on my palate.

The term "farm-to-table" gets thrown around a lot to describe the Vermont dining scene, and those words can become an abstraction. Yet here I was enjoying the harvest I watched take place at a farm just a few hours earlier.

My mind might think of farm-to-table as a concept. My mouth understands it as a delightfully tasty reality.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.