A sweet, tangy aroma wafts over the clubhouse kitchen at The Cedars at Salmon Creek golf course.
The rural northeast Clark County golf course in Brush Prairie and its clubhouse are empty because the facility is closed Mondays. It’s the only day of the week the place is closed.
And that’s why Dave Silagy is standing sentry over a 50-gallon stainless steel tank, holding what appears to be a small canoe paddle.
He’s stirring the alluringly fragrant concoction in the vat — a proprietary mix that will soon be funneled into 8-ounce bottles of Roasted Habanero Sauce.
Silagy Sauce
Owner: Dave Silagy.
Home: Battle Ground.
Revenue: $50,000 in 2017; $250,000 to $275,000 in 2018; $400,000 projected this year.
Motto: “Keep our mouth shut and let our sauce do all the talking.”
Distribution: 60 restaurants and 20 grocery stores in Clark County.
Local distributors: Corwin Beverage Co. and Kendall’s Pioneer Distributing, both of Ridgefield.
Silagy is entering his third year as the owner of Silagy Sauces. It’s an enterprise that grew from friends who liked the sauces he brought to social gatherings and urged him to sell to grocery stores and restaurants. Silagy Sauces are distributed to about 60 restaurants and 20 grocery stores in Clark County. And he’s poised to expand distribution to Seattle and Oregon with the hope of one day supplying a network of customers along the West Coast.
If that happens, he will likely have outgrown the golf course’s kitchen.
He’s grateful for that venue, made available through The Cedars owner, Gordy Jolma. Initially, Silagy had been making the sauce in his Battle Ground-area home. Jolma is a longtime friend.
Then one day, Silagy told Jolma, “Dude, I need a place where I can make some more sauce than just a couple of gallons at home.” Silagy pays $15 an hour to use the kitchen.
Silagy, 56, knows his need for a commercial kitchen is a common one for food entrepreneurs in the county. Cooks with an eye on restaurant and grocery store clientele usually follow the same route as Silagy: Prepare your product in your home, after securing state Department of Agriculture approval. If sales take off, look to expand to a commercial kitchen that has available space.
“We’re all running around, scrambling, trying to find places to cook,” Silagy said.
Cost is the biggest roadblock to developing a commercial kitchen. The price tag could range from $250,000 to $1 million, said Holly Hansen, market manager for the Farmers’ Market at Battle Ground Village and an organizer with the nonprofit Clark County Food Systems Council.
A rental commercial kitchen could possibly be part of a future “food hub” council participants have envisioned. A food hub could be a place where small, local farmers bring their products for processing and distributing.
Hansen said efforts to establish a commercial kitchen are at a formative stage. She said she hoped to discuss the vision in detail as it gets closer to reality.
The food hub and a commercial kitchen likely will be discussed Friday at the 2019 Food Summit, hosted by Clark College in partnership with the food council. The all-day event, which focuses on local food production and consumption, will be held at the college’s Columbia Tech Center building, 18700 S.E. Mill Plain Blvd., Vancouver.
Silagy taps local sources for his ingredients when possible. He buys his fresh peppers, for example, from Stoney Goat Agriculture Collective in Ridgefield and Flat Tack Farm in Vancouver. And he shops at the Vancouver Farmers Market. He processes 1,000 pounds of peppers a month.
On a recent Monday, he arrived at the golf course kitchen at 6:30 a.m. with his 27-year-old twin sons, Mitchell and Ryan. They spent the first couple of hours sanitizing surfaces, then set about preparing ingredients.
The sauce is all fresh, no preservatives, Silagy says, noting that there’s pureed carrots in the recipe. He declines to say anything more about the mix.
They’ll bottle 80 gallons of sauce, filling bottles at six-second intervals. And they’ll be done by 4:30 p.m. Some other Monday they’ll be bottling the most popular flavor, the tangy Cilantro Lime Serrano Sauce. The habanero and cilantro sauces retail for about $8. Gallon jugs, mostly for restaurant customers, are $60. A ghost pepper sauce — to appeal to customers who prefer their sauces really hot — is in the works.
Silagy also participates in a family business started by his father, a fiberglass fabrication business in Brush Prairie called Cheyenne Manufacturing.
But these days, he estimates 85 percent of his time is spent on growing the sauce business.
“It was a hobby,” he says. “I was giving it away to my friends. Then a lot of people started pushing me. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll start a little tiny business. It will be fun.’ ”
