Saucy story!

INSIDE STORY: A Shercock man who took up a culinary hobby to find some headspace from his counselling work ended up creating an award-winning range of sauces. Damian McCarney caught up with Frank Fitzpatrick to get a flavour of the story and to hear about the secret ingredient to his success...

“That’s the big food accolade - the biggy,” enthuses Frank Fitzpatrick of the Blás na hÉireann gold badge adorning his barbecue sauce.

Frank has three different products - a gourmet tomato ketchup, a barbecue marinade, and smoked barbecue sauce - the latter of which was the condiment decorated with the gold award. The Fitzpatrick Gourmet Ketchup range is stocked in high-end stores nationwide, and Frank is hopeful sales will continue to grow when lockdown finally subsides.

Frank’s nine to five job is working as an addiction counsellor in Dundalk. He credits that demanding role for his dipping into the world of sauce making.

“In this line of work you need to look after yourself in order to give a hundred per cent to the clients. You need to get down time, rest. I tore into messing around in the kitchen, experimenting with stuff.”

He describes himself as a “home cook with a passion handed down from my mother”.

His late mother, Agnes was a big influence on his work: “She had a great interest in cooking, so I wanted to replicate my mother’s home cooking in a sauce.”

Frank had spent almost 20 years in London working on the front line in homeless and addiction services. When a job opportunity presented itself in his home county in 2010 he eagerly seized it, and now is back at this homeplace where he was reared in Glasleck.

It was while “messing around” he had a brain wave.

“Italians put vodka into pasta sauce, and I thought, what about me putting poitín into a sauce?”

Secret ingredient

The magical ingredient of ‘poitín’ has proven inspired.

“The whole idea in business is to create some slightly different,” explains Frank. “You don’t have to reinvent the light bulb, but do something with a twist on it.”

Let’s cut straight to the chase on the póitín – it surely isn’t, is it?

It’s something he’s used to answering. He takes us back to the Taste of Cavan in 2016: “Everyone who came to me said, Jaysus, they were laughing - ‘Oh my God, poitín!’

“They all say to me, ‘And where do you get your poitín?’ This is where the bit of craic comes in: you go with a bit of hush hush – I can’t tell you that, but all I can say is it’s above board, it’s compliant with Revenue, it’s complaint with Food Safety and it’s all above board.”

Frank suspects everyone knows it’s up front, “but a lot of people like to just go along with the story.”

He explains: “There’s one and a half per cent poitín added but, in an ambient product, the alcohol burns off in the cooking, so you are just left with the flavour.”

The first sauce he came up with was gourmet ketchup.

“It has a real texture to it,” he enthuses. “You are eating real food instead of something that’s silky, this has a bite to it. It really complements a burger.”

The ketchup won a “Great Taste” award in the UK in 2019, and the gold winning barbecue sauce developed from there. Frank’s sticky barbecue marinade was also a Blás na hÉireann finalist.

“The three of them are sporting little stamps, and foodies in particular are looking for those little recognitions,” he says.

Cottage industry

So how do you go from messing about in your kitchen to having an award winning range of sauces?

Frank undertook a food start-up course with the Local Enterprise Office (LEO), where his idea raised a few eyebrows.

“Some people thought to be honest: let’s go for men in the white coats for this fella.

“But I love challenges - that’s an element with me. I seen potential there for poitín, something that’s part and parcel to the whole culture - bring it in from the wilderness and put a modern twist on it.”

Cue the experts

Frank developed a sauce to a “rudimentary state”, but to refine it further he recruited the help of experts. An Enterprise Ireland grant from of €5,000 saw him consult with the team at Galway’s St Angela’s Food Technology Centre who he rates as “brilliant”.

“There was slight tweaking – they might say you had too much chilli. They have sensory analysis where you have people blind tasting and feeding the info into a computer, and say it needs a slight tweeking. They help you finetune it. They also do the shelf life analysis and microbiological testing to get it market ready.

“They got my recipe and helped me to perfect it, to get it as they say ‘shelf ready’.”

He concedes there’s “only so much you can do at home” so, to upscale production, he entrusted the recipe with The Scullery.

“It’s outsourced production, so instead of spending the leg and an arm on expanding the kitchen - you get someone with the expertise to make it for you for the time being. And then I go off and do what I’m good at, do the talking, do the sales.”

If proof were needed of the quality of his products and sales patter, look no further than the fact that his sauces are stocked in Sheridans Cheesemongers, the renowned store based near Kells.

“Sheridans were great. They said ‘oh my God, this is great tasting stuff and also with the twist on it - the Irish poitín’.”

“For some reason I don’t know if it’s great tasting because of the poitín, because of the difference, but I found myself in Sheridans. And probably there would be hundreds of people queuing up trying to get in there to a premium store - the new kid on the block got in there! It’s a lovely feeling.”

Since Sheridans came on board, Frank says, the sauces have gone “from strength to strength” as they started distributing it to other high-end stores around the country.

Sheridans also introduced him to Dublin’s Fallon and Byrne.

High end

“That’s the crème de la crème,” he remarks. “I mightn’t be making much at the moment, but it’s a great feeling. It’s great for your CV to say that I’m up there in Fallon and Byrne.”

He’s also on the ‘Food Academy’ with SuperValu, and has his sauces on the shelves in Carrickmacross, Cootehill and Bailieborough.

While he says “it’s going quite well” for Fitzpatrick’s Gourmet Ketchup, the pandemic hindered its growth.

“Before this whole crisis started ,I was out doing tastings, that’s when you really get the customer on board. They come over, taste it and think ‘Gee, good product’. That’s how you get the repeat custom.”

Looking to the future Frank considers the question on whether he could turn his sauce making into a full-time career.

“I could do, you never say never. My approach is to build things up incrementally, get everything into place and you never know. It’d be a dream I have. Little breaks are coming my way. Only for Covid that award might have springboarded things further.”