WARREN — Anyone craving authentic jerk chicken, tender and juicy, slow-cooked on the grill, along with rice and peas, a classic Jamaican side, need only to go to Beth’s Farm Market every weekend while Dennis McCalla is cooking.

For the 23rd season, McCalla, a loyal employee of Beth’s Farm Market, has returned to the farm and has turned a family recipe into a customer favorite. Inside a corrugated metal hut that Beth’s Farm Market had built for him, McCalla can be found tending the grill with seasoned jerk chicken and pouring a giant stockpot of rice and peas into chafers while customers line up. There are plenty of picnic tables behind the hut, under shady trees.

When McCalla first went to Beth’s in 2000, he worked on the farm through a program supported by the Jamaican government for traveling farm workers. His specialty was tending to the strawberries. The farm, owned by Beth and Vincent Ahlholm since 1979, offers a variety of produce, from spinach, tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries, and sweet corn, to apples, pumpkins, and potatoes, in season.

“We used to cook down by the camp where we stay and we recommended [those dishes] when they’d put on a community dinner in August,” he said.

Approximately five years ago, McCalla said the owners asked him to take his signature dish to the farm market on weekends and holiday Mondays.

The meal includes a half of jerk chicken, rice and peas (with kidney beans as the “peas”), festival bread, and a bottle of water, for $18.50, plus tax.

McCalla who was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, moved to the U.S. in 1999 and has been a naturalized citizen of the U.S. since 2017. He gets his chickens from a poultry farm in Waterville and slow-cooks them in Jamaican spices that he orders on the internet. He puts them on an industrial iron grill and takes several hours to seal in all of those flavors. The festival bread is made in-house similar to a sweet fry cake.

McCalla enjoys the process of cooking every weekend and having his own hut with his name on it.

“It’s all right, you know?” he said.

He said people return every year from out of state, not just to shop at Beth’s, which is a destination unto itself, but to make the drive for the chicken.

“It’s crazy sometimes, on a sunny day, we have people in a long line,” he said.

Visit Beth’s Farm Market in person at White Oak Farms on Western Road in Warren. The season runs from Mid-April through December; open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Visit Beth’s Farm Market’s Facebook page for more info on when McCalla will be cooking.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com