Founder Kurt Oriol hopes to show customers that similar to meat - think Japanese Kobe or Scottish Angus beef - a fish’s heritage makes a huge difference. Frozen fish purveyors to try Campo GrandeĬampo Grande’s Spanish fish box reads like the menu of a Bilbao seafood restaurant: thick filets of bacalao, meaty monkfish, juicy lubina, and more, all from the waters surrounding Spain. Some companies are already capitalizing on the latest freezing technologies to offer the highest-quality frozen fish. But now, emerging methods like pressure freezing, ultrasound freezing, and electrically assisted freezing stand to vastly improve the industry. According to experts, old methods like air blast or cryogenic freezing have been impediments to quality, due to slow freezing rates and the formation of ice crystals, which in turn damages muscle tissue and changes a fish’s color and texture. At an estimated $113.2 billion in 2020, it’s projected to reach $138.7 billion by 2027, and frozen seafood is driving some of that growth. One thing’s for sure: The global seafood market is booming. Add the convenience of home delivery, which most of today’s companies include gratis, and opting for frozen seems a no-brainer. He often cooks fish straight from frozen, especially during certain species’ off-seasons, to offer his signature dishes year-round.īecause the so-called fresh stuff is more susceptible to harmful bacteria and unsold stock is usually tossed, resulting in food waste, flash-frozen fish is often a safer and more sustainable alternative. Explains chef Erik Slater, “Many people don’t realize that almost all seafood in the marketplace is frozen or previously frozen - from what’s served at restaurants to what’s sold at the seafood counter.” At Slater’s restaurant, Seward Brewing Company in Seward, Alaska, wild local seafood is a menu staple. “Fresh” fish tends to be a misnomer anyway.
If pantry-friendly tinned fish was 2021’s hot girl food, maybe frozen fish is next. It can be practical and aspirational impressive and effortless. Unless you’re buying straight from the docks or reeling them in yourself, frozen fish is usually the freshest option on the market. Their seafood products may differ but they all aim to convince consumers of frozen fish’s many benefits: It’s high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids it’s sustainable and with a (freezer) shelf life of up to a year, it’s convenient for both everyday cooking and dinner parties - planned or impromptu. It pauses time.”Ĭampo Grande joins a growing number of specialty seafood companies offering curated selections that are sustainably sourced and of exceptional quality. “But when you bring a fish back to the dock and it’s butchered and frozen in the moment, it locks in all of the freshness. “People have a lot of prejudices about frozen fish from a bygone era,” Oriol says. Oriol hopes to sway customers on frozen fish. His company sources a range of items from artisanal producers in Spain, from Iberico pork to vaca vieja beef, and to bring American consumers some of the classic seafood of Spain, Campo Grande offers a fish box with flash-frozen items like European hake and Mediterranean baby clams. market for the Spanish foods of his childhood. Raised in Madrid, Oriol noticed a hole in the U.S. In November 2021, Kurt Oriol started Campo Grande, a company that specializes in high-end Spanish food products. Today, this sounds like a paradox - food that’s been frozen tends to be associated with convenience rather than fine dining. Birdseye aimed to make frozen food that was second only to fresh. “When it thawed it was mushy and less appealing than even canned food,” writes Birdseye’s biographer Mark Kurlansky. His obituaries would call him the “father of frozen foods.”įood production had already been industrialized - consider that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a harrowing account of the meat industry, was published in 1906. in 1917, Birdseye went on to develop the modern flash-freezing process. There, he noticed the Indigenous Inuits’ fishing practices: letting their catches freeze on the spot in the frigid, 30-below-zero air, preserving the ocean-fresh flavor. In 1912, a food-obsessed Brooklynite named Clarence Birdseye moved to Labrador, Canada.