When Chef Stuart Littlefield returned in the early 1990s to settle in Maine with his wife, Janelle, they first lived in Portland and then moved to Oxford, to raise their children near his family and hometown of Paris Hill. He says they had to recognize from the beginning that there was little opportunity in Oxford to earn a living practicing the skills each had honed over many years: he as a classical chef and she as catering director and dining room manager for large hotels.
Littlefield, 43, is still deferring his dream of opening a small, elegant restaurant where he could be recognized for his talents as a chef – “I’d love to go in at 8 or 9 a.m. and just prepare dinner – put food out that is truly too pretty to eat and get the ‘Oh, my,'” he says. “It’s worth the eight hours of prep, but unfortunately not the best equation to make money.” However, he feels he is nearing completion of a project which is nearly as gratifying: to use the Internet, gourmet food stores and large catalog houses like Williams Sonoma to sell eight-ounce attractively designed bottles of lobster, fish, crab, shrimp and clam extracts he has perfected over the past 15 years – what a French chef would call full glace – to America’s gourmet cooks and chef-owned restaurants. These extracts, he says, not only add concentrated flavor, they impart a texture to a sauce that cannot be achieved with other thickeners.
Because of their concentration and purity, Littlefield likens his extracts to real maple syrup. They contain no additives or preservatives, no added salt. He starts out with a pure stock made from extruded seafood by-product – fish racks, shrimp heads, crab shells, lobster bodies, tiny pieces of clams that are left when the clams are cut out of the shell. He reduces the stock 800 gallons at a time in a huge stainless steel vacuum evaporator hooked up to a two and one-half million BTU steam generator and a heat exchanger. The ratio of stock to extract is 30 gallons stock to one gallon extract, similar to maple syrup, which is 40 gallons of sap to one gallon finished product. In eight hours, Littlefield can make 800 pounds of extract.
This is the sort of reduction that takes place every day in the kitchen of a good French restaurant, he says, and he knows, because he trained in France under several eminent chefs, including the acclaimed Paul Bocuse. “It takes 10 hours in a kitchen to make the extract that a person can buy from me and simply use a small amount out of the bottle,” he says. The extract can be used to finish sauces or other dishes like lobster Newberg, clam or fish chowder, seafood bisque or shrimp stir fry.
Recently he used it in a clam and linguini dish for his family. (He does all the cooking, and his wife cleans up, a task he says can be formidable: “I can trash a kitchen,” he admits.). “I took some chopped fresh clams, cooked them with oil and garlic, added some half and half and two tablespoons clam extract,” he says. “Added the cooked linguini and fresh cracked pepper and that was it – instant gourmet.
“Every time I show the extracts to people who know what they are, they say, ‘Where have you been all my life? These are such a pain to make. They make my whole house smell like fish.'”
Last year, Littlefield processed “tons and tons” of seafood by-product, 80 percent from Maine, at his plant on Route 26 in Oxford. He shipped the finished extract out in 55-gallon batches to industrial users, who at this point are his main source of income. The business, called Coastal Creations, Inc., employs a few full-time employees and a fluctuating number of part-time, depending on the availability of fresh product. His wife handles most of the marketing and publicity for this company and other ventures.
Two years ago, he became so bored keeping an eye on the extract processing – “just try standing around for eight hours watching an evaporator do its thing,” he says – he decided to open a fish market in the front room of the plant. There, in the summer season, he sells fresh lobster and fish, salads, spreads and frozen chowders and dinners that he makes on-site.
As if that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, three years ago, he created the “Lobster Pot Brownie,” a shelf-stable, dehydrated one-pound block lobster bait which is made from herring, pogies, mackerel and his extracts for added flavor. No artificial ingredients, he says, nothing that isn’t naturally in the ocean. For a while, he and his wife also raised mushrooms at the plant and sold them to a Boston distributor, a venture that failed because it was too successful – they couldn’t provide enough to satisfy the distributor, who abandoned them. However, if he can come up with financing, he is thinking about reviving that project now that he has worked out a way to increase production. In addition, he has been developing value-added recipes for Portland shellfish (WWF, March ’04).
Littlefield’s first cooking job was as a buffet cook in the Country Way Restaurant in South Paris. After graduating as an honor student from Oxford Hills High School, he earned an Associate’s Degree in Applied Science with a major in Culinary Arts from Southern Maine Vocational Technical Institute. He left Maine at age 18 to work for Stouffer’s Management Food Service in Chicago, Illinois, an eye-opening experience for a young man from Paris Hill: huge kitchens, no expense spared. “We could buy anything,” he says.
In Illinois he met his mentor, Jean Banchet, Chef-Owner of Le Francais, a restaurant in Wheeling, Illinois. Banchet had been brought to the United States to open Hugh Hefner’s Lake Geneva Playboy Club. Banchet was so respected in his native France he was chosen to create a 60th birthday dinner party at his restaurant in Wheeling for Paul Bocuse. Littlefield describes him as a “tyrant in the kitchen – of the old school – but after awhile,” he says, “he didn’t scream at me any more.” After Littlefield had been with him for two years, Banchet arranged for him to study with famous chefs in France.
When Littlefield returned to the states, he worked for several years in Miami, then moved to Portland, where he bought Foodworks, Inc., renaming it Chef Stuart’s Foodworks, a gourmet catering business whose clientele, he says, were “like a Who’s Who of Portland.” While buying seafood for the business, he kept noticing the immense amounts of processing by-product. Since he had trained in French kitchens where nothing was wasted and had already developed fish, beef and chicken extracts while working in Miami, he began to make extracts again, focusing on seafood. He markets them to local chefs.
Just as he was ready to leave the catering business, a large Japanese company gave him a letter of intent to purchase large quantities of the extracts. “I found property, purchased equipment and began production,” he says, “and they never honored one word of that letter. We scrambled and suffered pretty good, but we managed to keep our heads above water.” Now he wants to come full circle, to marketing extract in small quantities, in addition to retaining the industrial market.
Littlefield has been in many gourmet food stores in big cities during the past 15 years, but has never seen a product that can compare with his seafood extracts. Seafood bases are available, but he finds that salt is always the second ingredient in them, and they don’t have the purity of his product. “Nobody sells what I make,” he says. “They have beef and chicken extracts, but no seafood. Part of me wants to find it and confirm I am right, that there is a market for this, and part of me says, ‘Whew, no one else has it!'”
This is a product that shows his true talents, he believes, and that is the next best thing to having his own restaurant. “If I sent this to Paul Bocuse, he would recognize its quality,” he says. That gives him great satisfaction. For further information on Coastal Creations’ products, call 743-6444.