MAINE — August, 6, 2012 — Culinary trends can be tricky to predict with the recent trend to sample both exotic and local foods—sometimes on the same plate. The roster of locally available foods is well known, and here in Maine one can expect rather hearty fare; potatoes, lobster, apples and kale are among the offerings, but lately there’s been a newcomer by way of Port Clyde Fresh Catch (PCFC).
Though once considered the province of the adventurous gastronomic, squid have found a place among the palate of Maine eaters, and PCFC can barely keep up with demand. A midweek visit to their processing facilities found PCFC President Glen Libby in a blur of activities, among them packing up a fresh order for The Slipway, a restaurant in Thomaston. Libby rushes through the tiny halls lined with freezers and fishtubs, packing list in hand. He rattles through a mental checklist out loud, and pauses: “Wow, look at that. Speaking of squid, Slipway just ordered 20 pounds on Monday, and they want another 30 pounds, and here it’s just two days later.”
Libby says, “It’s nice to see this happening. Even as a kid, I remember looking over the side of the docks when we brought in our catch. You could shine a light down there and there would just be thousands of squid, coming up to the light. ‘You could sell those’, I’d think.” But until recently, squid never found a foothold in Maine markets. “A similar thing happened with crab meat. Years ago if you brought a haul of crab down to the Fish Exchange, they’d call you up and tell you to come get it. No one would buy it! Now look out in that room.” Libby points a Sharpie marker down the hall at a processing room, where five people are lined up around a large white table, rapidly picking apart a small mountain of crabs.
For business reasons, PCFC asks that their source for the squid meat remain anonymous, however, “We really want to give hats off to them, because up until this time, we couldn’t find anyone to do this kind of fishing,” says Dick Mcgee, the treasurer and CFO of Port Clyde Fresh Catch. “Now the economy’s got its troubles, but rather than sitting around and complaining about no work, these two are going out and fishing all night.” At 7 a.m., the two arrive at PCFC with the night’s haul, and from the sound of things, it shows a real opportunity for others who are willing to do the work. “That’s what we want. There could be a lot more of these operations. Think of how many people could be working, if we keep it small, keep it unique, keep the price up for the fishermen,” says Mcgee. Libby, back in the shipping room at Fresh Catch, opines on the new market for squid. “We’d like to see an incremental approach to this new resource that has just ‘appeared,’ if you will. Sure, it seems plentiful, and we could go out there and take as many as we can, but we’ve tried the industrial approach. You end up with a whole infrastructure that requires a lot of money to maintain. It’s kind of neat to see someone who doesn’t have two nickels to rub together go out with a hook and line at night and come in in the morning, and make a few bucks. That’s the ultimate entrepreneur, isn’t it?”
Read the full story at the Working Waterfront