Pasta sauce like grandma used to make. Clovis business goes all-in on family recipe

Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
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• Richard and Nancy launched Pizzio’s Pasta Sauce based on Richard’s version.
• They applied for a business license and got food handler’s licenses.
• They later found Marie Pizzio’s handwritten recipe in her kitchen cabinet.

Richard and Nancy Burchfiel of Clovis were looking to reconnect when they went on a date night in April. They have two children together, as well as busy careers.

“What is our passion — what are we really good at doing?” said Nancy, a certified family nurse practitioner at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera. “And that’s cooking.”

They decided to launch a pasta sauce company.

In their family, the ultimate expression of home is a pasta sauce (or gravy, as it’s also known by) that Richard’s great-grandmother, Marie Pizzio, “perfected” and raised the entire family on. Marie was a woman known for her generosity, and there was frequently a giant pot of sauce on the stove to feed anyone who stopped by.

So that’s what they decided to can and bring to market: Pizzio’s Pasta Sauce.

Richard and Nancy applied for the business license that night, and then spent the next several weeks taking classes, testing recipes and getting certified to safely can and sell their pasta sauce, including both getting a food handler’s license.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” said Richard, the chief informational officer at Central Valley Meat Co.

Finding the original flavor

The version of the sauce Richard made for the past several years was not the version the entire family grew up on. Great-Grandma Marie, who served the sauce every Thursday and Sunday night for decades, could stand next to someone and tell them how to make the recipe, but it would never turn out the way hers did.

“It would always be a dash here, a dash there,” Richard said.

Since she’d died in 2014, the recipe was thought to be lost to time.

To make sure the sauce was safe to can and would be shelf-stable for at least a year, Richard began modifying the recipe. His grandmother, Susanne Pizzio Foster, is Marie’s eldest daughter, and after one experiment, she told him he’d gotten the recipe exactly right.

“My mother’s sauce had a specific taste, and there was a freshness about it,” Foster said.

They didn’t realize how right they’d gotten it until a few weeks after that.

The house Marie lived in is still in the family. She and her husband, Dominick, originally lived in New Jersey, but moved out to Fresno after World War II. (He was a tomato worker for some time before joining PG&E.) The house is being remodeled, and so that meant cleaning out the kitchen.

There was an envelope filled with old newspaper clippings, photos and cards hidden in the cabinet above the refrigerator.

“Everyone in our family is pretty short,” Foster said. “I have no idea how it got up there.”

Inside the larger envelope, tucked away in a Hallmark envelope, was the original recipe, in Marie’s hand.

The family believes that they found the original recipe at the exact moment they were meant to find it.

“Grannie was like, ‘now I want you to find it’,” Nancy said.

Family History, Front and Center

Even the design of the can is simmered in family history. The photo on the front of the can is one that Marie sent to Dominick during WWII, and the company’s motto — “Phones down, pass the bread” — reaches back to the rules of the table that the entire family grew up on: Everyone talks about their day at the dinner table.

“Our kids roll their eyes at it, but we feel it’s very important,” Richard said.

All jars are canned by Richard and Nancy on the weekends at Clovis Culinary Center. They are available at Clovis Meat Market, and Pizzio will also be at ClovisFest and other events in Clovis.

Every purchase comes with a recipe from the cookbook Richard’s mother made for daughters-in-law entering the family many Christmases ago.

“It’s been a whirlwind,” Richard said. “You think it’s just pasta sauce, but it really is generations of love going into a jar.”