Author Archives: Alejandro Cantagallo

About Alejandro Cantagallo

Growing up in Queens, the son of immigrants, Alejandro had an early start in the food world helping his father out in the family's butcher's shop. Throughout his twenties he worked his way through the front of the house at a number of north shore country clubs and later shifted gears and started culinary school at CUNY CityTech. In 2010 Alejandro opened Floresta and despite acclaim closed a year later. Currently, he is a senior college lab technician in the purchasing and operations arm of the Hospitality Management Department at CUNY New York City College of Technology and is also an adjunct professor in the same department. Alejandro's current instructional workload includes Culinary 1 and Introduction to Food and Beverage Management.

Another major player makes it’s way into the BKLYN food scene

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Wegmans to Open at Brooklyn Navy Yard

Not many grocery stores can claim cult followings, certainly not in Brooklyn, where the only options in some neighborhoods tend to be oversize bodegas carrying expired goods or overpriced green grocers full of kale, quinoa and craft beer.

Wegmans, the family-owned, Rochester-based chain of 85 stores concentrated in the Great Lakes region and the Washington Beltway, has that kind of following, inspiring fan websites, hashtags, T-shirts, even a high school musicalabout a couple who finds love in the aisles. The company is poised to open its first New York City store, and it has selected one of the most ripe locations: the derelict Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Egg Farms Hit Hard as Bird Flu Affects Millions of Hens

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Yet again, another example of how they WAY in which we farm in the country exposes us to great risk.

Mr. Dean, a son of the founder of one of the country’s biggest egg producers, the Center Fresh Group, must kill and dispose of about 5.5 million laying hens housed in 26 metal barns that rise among the rolling corn and soybean fields here.

Deadly avian flu viruses have affected more than 33 million turkeys, chickens and ducks in more than a dozen states since December. The toll at Center Fresh farms alone accounts for nearly 17 percent of the nation’s poultry that has either been killed by bird flu or is being euthanized to prevent its spread.

The lasting and deepening of one company’s massive blunder

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Blue Bell Creameries to Lay Off 1,450 Workers After Listeria Recall:

It’s easy to think that there is some big company lurking in the shadows getting in trouble for what they did and while that may or may not be true, what is real, is the lives of the people not only affected by the disease caused by the listeria outbreak, but also the lives of the workers that made the ice cream, who are now out of a job.

Blue Bell Creameries’ listeria crisis is bad news for ice cream lovers and for the company’s employees as well. Last month, Blue Bell voluntarily recalled all of its ice cream after it was found that some of the products contained Listeria, which resulted in ten illnesses and three deaths. Now, according to the USA Today, 1,450 of Blue Bell’s 3,900 person workforce will be laid off to help the company save money. 750 full-time employees will lose their jobs alongside 700 part-time workers. An additional 1,400 staff members will be furloughed. 

Big Meat: The indie butcher business grows up – Quartz

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Big Meat: The indie butcher business grows up – Quartz.

 

It turns out the challenge facing the meat business doesn’t come from the consumer side. Americans like meat. They didn’t need a primal food craze to convince them of that. But in places where the animals don’t come with a provenance, the butchery trade doesn’t attract new entrants because the labor economics just plain suck.

Meet Will Allen, The Urban Farmer Starting His Own Revolution

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Here’s another example of the changing landscape in food production, distribution and development.

When you think of farming towns, Milwaukee-proper might not be the first to come to mind. The large Wisconsin city is perhaps better known for its famed breweries and picturesque location along Lake Michigan, but one resident there has been on a mission to make farming more accessible even within the city limits.

Will Allen is a former professional athlete who played basketball throughout college at the University of Miami and post-college in Belgium. Though he has also held jobs in corporate America, Allen has spent the last 21 years in a completely different profession: urban farmer.

 

 

Why are Lobsters So Expensive?

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An in depth piece on the rise of the lobster in the US.

Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, lobsters were everywhere. They washed up along the New England coast like so much satanic jetsam, scuttling around and snapping their claws—and because no one bothered to kill and eat them in large numbers, most were huge. They weighed three to six pounds on average, which indicated that they were somewhere between fifteen and thirty years old.

In the mid-1800s, tinned lobster, served cold, became a kind of cheap salad-bar fixing across the country. This drove up demand, which drove the big lobsters to extinction, leaving lobstermen to harvest the smaller one- and two-pounders that are still the industry’s bread and butter today. Around the turn of the century, local restaurateurs in Maine started serving whole, boiled lobsters to rich summer vacationers as a marquee main dish. Thus the image of the modern lobster was born, a natural accompaniment to tuxedos, top hats, caviar, and Champagne: fancy, steaming, bright red on a silver platter. The advent of refrigerated shipping spread the trend to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

 

In other news, ever wonder why Lobsters turn red when you cook them?

Cooking lobster always feels a little magical: You drop a blue shellfish into a pot of boiling water, and a few minutes later, you take out a bright red shellfish.

Even scientists have long been at a loss to explain the chemistry underpinning this alchemy. One team of chemists from the University of Manchester in Englandbelieved they had an explanation way back in 2002, but later work indicated that their hypothesis only explained a third of the color change.

It’s getting harder to know what you’re eating these days and for some, more dangerous

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Consumer Reports just published a comprehensive study of the safety of frozen shrimp that uncovered some appalling results. It turns out that all those people who call shrimp “the cockroaches of the sea” are kinda right.

The magazine’s investigators bought 342 packages of frozen shrimp, some raw and some cooked, from several major supermarket chains. They tested the shellfish for pathogens and antibiotics, and found that 60 percent contained one of four types of bacteria that can be cause disease in humans — including 16 percent of the cooked, ready-to-eat samples. These bacteria included vibrio, a potentially lethal bacteria closely associated with raw oysters that is becoming more common as the temperature of the world’s oceans rises.

Article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/frozen-shrimp_n_7164248.html?utm_hp_ref=taste&ir=Taste