By James A. Merolla / Sun Chronicle Staff
Monday, April 7, 2008 1:17 AM EDT
FALL RIVER — Jeff Wirtz is dabbling by the pound with the lobster bisque again.
In a spotless stainless steel lab and kitchen in the middle of a gigantic 65,000-square foot building which houses Blount Seafood Corp. and Blount Fine Foods, Wirtz, 32, a Norfolk native, is playing with recipes and ingredients.
A 1994 graduate of King Philip Regional High School, he is the corporate chef for a 128-year-old seafood supplier, which now operates out of a state-of-the-art food processing facility in Fall River’s industrial park.
It is his job to make or re-make the chowders, soups and bisques for restaurant chains, cruise lines and warehouse stores like Sam’s Club or BJ’s Wholesale and Costco.
Twenty pounds of soup? Try 2,000.
Wirtz, who holds a bachelor of science degree in culinary arts and a master’s in teacher education from Johnson & Wales University, also must listen to the ripple of customer feedback and correct, by way of his advanced taste buds, any displeasure in the mix. He also has to develop new sauces, bisques and soups for the company’s own product line. It’s no easy task, with a recipe originally meant to serve a dozen multiplied 50 to 100
Wirtz relaxes, sans spoon, with his wife Heather and young sons Cameron and Kason.
SUN CHRONICLE: I grew up in the shadow of Blount Seafood in Warren, R.I. I even worked in that building as a teen.
JEFF WIRTZ: I worked there, too, before here. Lovely aroma (laughs), especially in the summer.
SC: I can still smell it when I close my eyes. It’s a different world here in this 65,000-square-foot arena. What’s your job description?
WIRTZ: Corporate chef. I handle the development, the creative side, the flavor side, the ingredients, the set up. We make new products or try to match an existing product already being served. We supply restaurant chains, cruise ships, independent restaurants, supermarkets, club stores. We are a food service supplier as well as a retail company.
SC: Tell me about making soups and chowders by the gallon ...
WIRTZ: We make 2,000 pounds (250 gallons) at a clip of soup.
SC: Pounds?
WIRTZ: We (go by) weight, not liquid measure. Everything we do is by the pound, not by the gallon. We convert recipes from pounds to grams. We do smaller batches based on a percentage. The percentage of ingredients doesn’t change as you increase the batch. We make the formula and the product in here. We go from, say, 12 pounds, up to 50 pounds in here. Once we feel comfortable that everything is right, we will make a 1,000-pound batch of soup.
If it works without a recipe adjustment, or other considerations, we make a full batch.
SC: This feels like a competitive business. How much? Do you have to play it safe, keep only the line up?
WIRTZ: Very competitive. If you don’t stay on top of trends, you are left behind. In the lab, we are allowed to be creative, but we are not a restaurant, per se, we aren’t a chef working on the line. So, whatever we do here has to transfer to our production capabilities.
If not, it’s a waste of time.
There is a constant — how do I put this gently — battle between research and development and manufacturing (Editor’s note: We weren’t allowed to see the manufacturing/plant side of things, as Blount keeps its processes away from public eyes). The production side of things is all about efficiency, running faster, pushing through the plant, but the culinary side is slower, with a longer cooking time.
It’s like a chef who makes a great dinner special, then is not actually there to cook it himself. That’s the checks and balances.
SC: Tell our readers about the great history of the company you work for.
WIRTZ: The Blount family started business back in 1880. They were oystermen. They bought an ice company. Then, the Hurricane of 1938 destroyed the oyster business in Rhode Island.
What they decided to do was to take the boats further out and harvest sea clams. They were among the first people to do IQF — Individually Quick Frozen. Clarence Birdseye perfected the process.
They got a good contract with the government to supply a less expensive protein for troops during World War II. For quite a few years, all they did was to harvest sea clams. Then, they got a contract with a large soup company and packed all IQF meat for clam chowder. So, the next logical step was to make clam chowder, then the soup business, and expand.
SC: So, what are your top selling products today?
WIRTZ: Our top items are New England clam chowder, Maine lobster bisque, shrimp and roasted corn chowder.
SC: Do you also correct recipes that may change in taste slightly once they go out?
WIRTZ: Yes, every recipe has a specific time frame to add ingredients, minutes of temperature, minutes of time and minutes of packing out temperatures.
In between, we conduct run tests. We’ll take the bisque or chowder and strain it, cool it down, take a run test for a specific viscosity. If all that passes and (he lists another series of things that he checks) we pack it out.
SC: What about defective food products?
WIRTZ: Our QA (Quality Assurance) department tests for certain bacteria in the lab, but we’ve never had anything called back.
SC: A perfect record here?
WIRTZ: No recalls.
SC: Can you experiment much with taste or is it the same old, same old?
WIRTZ: If a customer is looking for, let’s say, an Asian-style soup, we can be very creative when we get a request like that. We can use a hot (trendy) spice. Yes, then, we can be more creative.
SC: Where do you learn about the hottest food trends?
WIRTZ: We use information from our marketing department, trade magazines. The Food Network is huge, a juggernaut.
SC: What’s your biggest achievement, Jeff?
WIRTZ: Jasper White, one of the foremost chefs in the country, we were working on a project for him to match his chowder to put in his Summer Shack restaurants. He has a book called ‘50 Chowders.’ He’s the Chowder Guru. We worked on matching his chowder. The first sample I sent him, he e-mailed my boss and told him how perfectly it was matched. We took it and matched it just as well as if he had made it himself. That was a big achievement.
SC: Who’s the most important person you’ve ever cooked for?
WIRTZ: At Johnson & Wales, I cooked for Hillary Clinton, when Bill Clinton was president. She came to Providence for the National Mayors Convention. We had to go through security screenings, they checked us all out. We had to serve the first lady, all the mayors from around the country in attendance AND the Secret Service. They inspected all the food, making sure it was all right. That was a big deal.
