Salsa maker opening business in Rathdrum
RATHDRUM – Combine fresh green jalapenos, red tomatoes, secret spices and a love of motorcycles and steep with a dash of family history seasoned with a pinch of Mexican culture, and you get an authentic salsa packed with flavor and heat.
New to the market, Taco Chic Salsa (pronounced chick) is revving up for a big impact. The locally made salsa soon will be manufactured and offered at a salsa-tasting bar in Rathdrum.
The salsa is named after its maker, Juanita Carmack, known to her biker friends as “the taco chic.”
“Some people say, ‘Oh that’s French.’ I don’t care. If I put a K on it, it’s chicken,” Carmack said.
Carmack, who lives in Coeur d’Alene, has been making salsa for 30 years from an old family recipe handed down from her great-grandmother. “It’s probably more than 100 years old. I could only trace it back to my great-grandmother,” she said.
In 1918 during the Mexican Revolution Carmack’s great-grandfather, Emeterio Ortiz, and his wife, Victoriana, fled their home and the wrath of the Mexican government and moved to the United States. They moved with their family which included two infant granddaughters, one of whom was Carmack’s mother, Rafaela.
It was Rafaela who kept Victoriana’s salsa recipe alive. “I’ve always eaten homemade salsa,” said Carmack. “I’ve never eaten store-bought salsa.”
Carmack, the mother of two adult children, spent 15 years as a stay-at-home mom. She then worked as an executive assistant for five or six local companies, losing her job when businesses failed. And she made salsa – gallons of it – that she gave away to friends.
It got to be a lot of work.
And then a friend gave her a tip.
“He said, ‘Why are you wasting your time with all this stuff? Your money’s in your salsa,’ ” Carmack recalled.
She spent a year researching how to turn her 100-year-old recipe into a marketable product. She’d never been in a commercial kitchen before, didn’t know what it took to get FDA approval and had to learn how to get a bar code and how to label and price her product. “I worked on it a year, doing my homework.”
Her son, Patrick, who’d worked in restaurants, helped her “extend” her recipe to make large batches. “I used to make a gallon. I had to grow it bigger,” she said. It couldn’t be done by tripling the recipe; it had to be done by taste, she said.
Finally, she had a product, and with a business card and samples, she headed out to stores in Spokane. She didn’t know how her salsa would be received.
“I cooked the whole month of March. By the first week of April, I was sold out,” Carmack said.
“Once they taste it, they buy it.”
Her first customer was Sonic Burritos. Now, six months later, her salsa is carried by some 20 stores and restaurants in Spokane and North Idaho. Carmack and her husband, John, work as a team preparing, cooking and selling salsa.
“We sell a ton when she comes in to demo,” said Amy Clark, the specialty food buyer for Huckleberry’s. “It’s the best demo we’ve had.” It was also a big hit with Huckleberry’s employees. The sample Carmack brought in disappeared in 20 minutes.
“It’s her great-grandmother’s recipe. We don’t have anything like that, a heritage recipe,” Clark said.
“It’s spicy. It hits you on the back of the tongue so you can still taste the flavor,” Clark said.
Taco Chic Salsa comes in mild, medium and hot. “It’s more about flavor than heat,” Carmack said.
“The ambiance of the bottle and the family history make it different,” said Joe O’Neal, the friend who encouraged Carmack to sell her salsa. “It’s a unique product; her family history is unique.” That combination of a quality product with a history doesn’t happen often, O’Neal said.
The salsa bottle tells the story. A drawing of the “taco chic” depicts Carmack wearing a sombrero and riding a motorcycle draped with a bandolier of chili peppers. A family photograph from 1918 graces the bottle along with a brief family history.
O’Neal adds that Taco Chic Salsa got a rave review from a very difficult critic – his son. “My son is a taco sauce critic,” he said. “He loved it.”
Carmarck currently rents commercial kitchen space from The Greenbriar Inn in Coeur d’Alene. That allows her to cook two evenings a week, making 25 to 30 gallons of salsa at a time. She knew she needed to expand, to have her own commercial kitchen.
When she discovered a Spanish-style mural on an old brick building on the corner of Main and MacCartney in Rathdrum, she knew immediately it was the right place. “It looked like it was transported from Mexico,” she said. She liked that the building was more than 100 years old – it went with her salsa recipe. “I wanted the building to have character, not just [be] an office in a strip mall.”
With the building undergoing renovation, she plans to open The Salsa Factory in mid-November. Salsa will be made on site and there will be a gift shop area and a tasting bar for people to sample the various salsas.
People may be tired of hearing the word authentic applied to food, Carmack said, “but this is authentic salsa.”