For years, Marc LaMaina has wanted to start selling his mother’s barbecue sauce, a family recipe nearly 80 years old.
Starting in April, he’ll finally get his wish.
“The recipe has been in my family for many years,” LaMaina, who owns Lucharitos on Main Street in Greenport, said in an interview last week. “Now that we’re finally doing it, I’m pretty excited.”
LaMaina said the restaurant will begin selling three different sauces this spring: a red traditional salsa, an avocado-based “salsa verde” and his family’s barbecue sauce.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do for her,” LaMaina said.
The 12-ounce bottled sauces, which will be sold under the Lucharitos name, are being bottled through A Taste of North Fork in Cutchogue, he said. The recipes have remained mostly unchanged from what’s sold in the restaurant (LaMaina said they had to add some lemon juice to the avocado salsa to keep it acidic enough for bottling).
The chefs at Lucharitos will work this week with bottlers from A Taste of North Fork to teach them the recipes.
“They come in, they work with our chefs, then they go back to their place and make huge batches of it,” LaMaina said.
After finishing test batches, the bottlers must test the bottles’ shelf life and send the sauces to Cornell Cooperative Extension to determine nutrition facts for its label.
The idea to bottle the sauces with A Taste of North Fork has been kicked around for more than a year, LaMaina said.
The time was right because of plans to expand Lucharitos, he said. Earlier this month, he submitted plans to double the size of the restaurant, adding a larger bar and a retail area to sell T-shirts, Mexican wrestling memorabilia and other products.
It just made sense to add the restaurant’s own sauces to the offerings, he said.
“Now we’re doing two projects at once,” he said.
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