Tag Archives: Boston Public Market

A recipe for cooking

Take one old hot dog factory. Add two big kitchens, eight convection ovens, 12 food truck spaces, several 15-gallon mixers, a frying pan logo, a 1,800 square-foot refrigerator and 45 start-ups. Stir in $15 million of public money, tax credits and donations. Cook for seven years while raising money, renovating the factory, and getting up to speed. Top it off with an executive director who knows her stuff.

Serve it to Bostonians at the Boston Public Market, the Greenway and commercial outlets all over the city.

Enjoy, as waiters say. You’ve just gotten the recipe for the CommonWealth Kitchen, a non-profit company in an old Pearl Hot Dog facility that nurtures start-up food businesses and also cooks for bigger but still personal food businesses that are so successful they can’t do it by themselves.

My friend Sally and I drove out to Dorchester, where the facility is, to see what was happening. I’d heard about this place from people at the Boston Public Market, since CWK, as is it known, prepares pasta for Nella Pasta and foods for other Boston Public Market vendors.

It helps to have the equivalent of a world-class chef managing the kitchens. That’s Jen Faigel. People like her are both commonplace and extraordinary. On the one hand, they’ve done what everyone is supposed to do. They’ve found their niche, educated themselves, gotten experience, grabbed an idea and made a success of themselves and their passion. On the other hand, when you find people like that, they seem rare.

Jen had worked in affordable housing, real estate development and economic development. The Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation was planning to tear down the decrepit factory and build affordable housing. Neighbors said no. “We want to keep jobs here,” they said. “What good is affordable housing if people can’t work?”

That was in 2009. By 2010, Jen, who’d been on the board of the former CropCircle Kitchen in JP, was brought in as a consultant by the Dorchester EDC to help create a food incubator that took advantage of the special conditions the 1910 factory offered. In 2014, Jen became the executive director of CWK, which absorbed CropCircle, and it opened with two kitchens.

One is for folks who have an idea for a food product, but don’t have the facilities or the know-how to make their favorite sauce, pickles or cake into a real business. Those budding entrepreneurs sign up at $35 an hour to use the large equipment CWK provides. Along with the space, they get instruction on crafting a business plan, getting the proper permits, scaling recipes, packaging their product, maintaining food safety, and handling finances, insurance and all the other nuts and bolts of running a small business.

So far, 45 businesses, including the Clover Food Lab, Roxy’s Grilled Cheese and McCrea’s Candies, have gone through the program and grown to the point where they’re on their own.

Forty-five small businesses are now sharing the large kitchen. They include Sweet Teez Bakery, whose owner, Teresa Thompson Maynard, arrived while we were visiting to make her cookies, cakes and cupcakes. “I left corporate on January 16,” she said. “CWK really helped me know what I’m doing.”

She needed the help, she said, since she admitted burning the first cake she baked in the large convection oven.

Grace Connor, aged 17, was also in the kitchen while we were visiting. This tall, thin South End girl was making cookie dough ice cream for Little G, her nascent ice cream venture.

Jen said a Boston police officer makes chutney at CWK, but we didn’t meet her.

On the other side of CWK’s entrance is the second kitchen, devoted to cooking for outside vendors whose facilities can’t handle the volume they need. While we were there, three women were baking cookies and also preparing a bloody Mary mix for Alex’s Ugly Sauce. Owner Alex Bourgeois now has his sauce in every Whole Foods on the East Coast, so he is experimenting with new products.

CWK also makes sauce for Mei Mei Street Kitchen and pumpkin puree for Harvard’s dining services. In the fridge were fifty pounds of cilantro, which shows the volume CWK can handle. Nearly 60 percent of the fresh ingredients are local, Jen said proudly.

CWK has relationships that connects its businesses to lenders when the start-ups need investment to expand. It constantly cleans the fans, floors, drains and equipment. It creates a community of cooks who can keep in touch after they disperse.

CWK has 14 staff members and a $1.6 million budget, with 50 percent from earned income, matched with grants and fund-raising. Within five years, Jen projects earned income will cover 85 percent of CWK’s costs. She has space for more start-ups.

So if you are intent on creating your own culinary sensation and offering it to the world, contact Jen. Everything you need to sign up is at www.commonwealthkitchen.org.

Leslie Adam goes shopping

Downtown Boston residents have embraced the Boston Public Market. It arrived along the Greenway at the right time. Food-lovers were tired of the agriculture-industrial complex and wanted their food to be real, local, maybe organic. They were repelled by the whipped-petroleum products lining the shelves in traditional supermarkets.

I’ve been to the market many times. The smoked fish and the lettuce are favorites, but I had never shopped there seriously, thinking it wouldn’t be possible. Then I talked to Beacon Hill resident Leslie Adam, who said she and a Back Bay friend do almost all their grocery shopping for their families weekly at the Boston Public Market.

So I went with Leslie on a recent Wednesday to see how she does it. First, she drives. She usually goes first thing in the morning. This time, however, we left about 11 a.m. and the parking garage was full. After waiting in a short line for cars to leave, we drove in, parked and were off. Leslie said Sunday mornings at 8 a.m. is her favorite time to go. With few other shoppers, she has the run of the place. In the summer, she often bikes over.

Leslie has two children, a husband and sometimes friends to feed. We headed for the back of the market because she likes to buy her bread, located near the main entrance, as she leaves so it won’t be crushed at the bottom of the bags she carries with her.

Sometimes Leslie brings along a list or recipes, but at other times she lets what is available speak to her.

On the way to the back, we stopped at two pop-up shops that spoke to her. Leslie bought popovers from The Popover Lady, based in Melrose, because she knew her kids would like them. She also stopped at ParTea, where owner Sarah Wasser told us she had combined her experience as a bartender with her love for tea and created natural infusions in tea-bag like packets for booze. Leslie decided such drinks might be a conversation starter for guests so she bought a ginger infusion. Like most of the vendors, the women running the pop-up shops ran Leslie’s credit card through Square on their phones or iPads.

Red’s Best was next. The counter man suggested redfish, caught on a Gloucester fishing boat, for good fish tacos. Leslie decided tacos would be tonight’s dinner. She also got salmon raised in the Bay of Fundy.

She pointed out the Spindrift bottles, filled with berries and sparkling water, in a refrigerated case in front of Red’s Best. She has met Bill Creelman, the Charlestown resident who created them.

Leslie bought eggs and both fresh and frozen meats—pork loin, chicken breasts and ground beef—from Stillman Quality Meats and Chestnut Farms. Her kids like the frozen pulled pork from Lilac Hedge, which she heats and piles in buns for lunches. Today, however, because the children’s schedules during the coming week meant lunch would be elsewhere, she went on to choose New Braintree-based Stillman Farms’ fresh spinach, sweet potatoes and squash, already peeled.

She bought roasted red pepper ravioli at Nella’s and smoked haddock for kedgeree—Leslie’s husband is British— and salmon belly at Boston Smoked Fish Company. She got Hardwick Stone cheese at Appleton Farms so her daughter could make the cheese sandwiches she has begun grilling for breakfast.

Around the corner we admired the dramatic tulips, the cider syrup—good on pork, said Leslie—honey and smoked maple syrup and caramels. Leslie didn’t buy any of those on our trip, but she said they were all were fabulous.

We ended our shop with a Harbison cheese from Vermont’s Jasper Hill Farm, salad greens from Corner Stalk Farm in East Boston and two loaves of bread from Mamadou’s Artisan Bakery in Winchester.

Leslie had most of the food she will need for the week. She’ll have to stop elsewhere for such staples as bananas, avocados and oranges, but it takes only a short time, she said, to fill in the blanks.

Leslie admits it is usually more expensive to shop at the Boston Public Market, but she does not want her children eating produce sprayed with who-knows-what. She also likes her money going into the local economy.

We paid only a dollar for parking since we had been there less than an hour and had validated the ticket. A bike delivery service is available for those who don’t want to schlep bags home.

One way to shop at the Boston Public Market in a more frugal way is to buy at the market the products that you really can’t live without and then go out the door. On Fridays and Saturdays, the traditional Haymarket carts and vendors are right outside with the best prices anywhere. You’ll get the best of both worlds.