GILROY
– Gilroy Garlic Festival visitors and volunteers who’ve longed
to take home the pasta sauce topping Gourmet Alley calamari have
had their wish granted by the Garlic Godfather.
Val Filice, master chef of the Gilroy Garlic Festival’s Gourmet
Alley, has bottled his famous sauce.
GILROY – Gilroy Garlic Festival visitors and volunteers who’ve longed to take home the pasta sauce topping Gourmet Alley calamari have had their wish granted by the Garlic Godfather.
Val Filice, master chef of the Gilroy Garlic Festival’s Gourmet Alley, has bottled his famous sauce.
“For years people have asked me to bottle my sauces,” Filice said of the tomato, garlic and oregano concoction he learned to make by watching his mother, a native of Calabria, Italy, cook in her Gilroy kitchen.
“I started out as a young boy watching Mom cook,” Filice said.
He eventually began cooking for the entire neighborhood, and then moved on to cooking his perfected pasta sauce for fund-raisers for St. Mary School.
“Numbers don’t bother me,” Filice said of cooking for large gatherings. “Making sauce for 500 people, that’s nothing for me.”
Other than fund-raisers, the only other way the public could taste Filice’s sauce was to buy some calamari at the Garlic Festival or to volunteer at the festival – Filice cooks for the Thursday night volunteer dinner prior to the start of the annual festival.
Now Filice’s sauce is available to the masses at gourmet and specialty stores. It will soon be available on the Internet, via a yet-to-be completed Web site at www.garlicgodfather.com. His bottled pasta sauce will also be sold at this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival.
Garlic Godfather Pasta Sauce is available in two varieties, regular and spicy. The spicy sauce has extra garlic and chili pepper, Filice said.
“It’s got a special crushed chili pepper,” he said. “It has a little power behind it.”
The sauce retails for $7.95 for a 24-ounce jar. It’s available in South Valley at Garlic World, Garlic Shoppe, Garlic Farm Center, and The Cherry Hut, all in Gilroy, and at Casa De Fruta and Hollister Drive-In Market. A total of 47 stores from the East Bay to the Peninsula and down the Central Coast now carry Garlic Godfather Pasta Sauce, which hit the market on June 1.
The sauce is bottled by Blossom Valley Foods of Gilroy. Filice taste-tests every batch to make sure they meet his exacting standards.
“I’m there tasting every batch they make,” Filice said. “If it doesn’t meet my taste buds, it doesn’t go into bottles.”
The idea to bottle the Garlic Godfather’s sauce was the brainchild of Filice’s partner, Shirley Conaty, and his daughter, Valerie. It took more than two years from the time they decided to pursue the project until jars of sauce bearing Filice’s picture and signature hit store shelves.
Conaty handled the paperwork, marketing and research to get the pasta sauce bottled and into gourmet food markets.
“I promised him that if he would get the sauce made, I would do the rest,” Conaty said. “All he has to do is show up and promote the sauce and kiss the girls, which he loves to do.”
Filice said Conaty is the reason the bottled sauce exists.
“She’s the one who deserves all the credit,” he said.
Conaty said she’s enjoyed the process, and isn’t done looking for stores to carry the sauce.
“We’ve had fun with this,” she said. “We’re looking into a distributor in Florida, because every year we go to the Garlic Festival in Del Ray Beach. And I’ve just been contacted by a distributor in the Los Angeles area.”
Filice earned the nickname “Garlic Godfather” because he helped festival cofounder Rudy Melone plan the original Gourmet Alley menu for the first Garlic Festival in 1979. Filice was – and still is – the master chef of Gourmet Alley and has been promoting Gilroy, garlic and the festival ever since.
“Twenty-five years ago, when we started the festival, a lot of people were ashamed to admit they used garlic,” Filice said. “Finally, they let garlic out of the closet.”
Filice believes the Gilroy Garlic Festival has had a lot to do with the increasing popularity and acceptance of the stinking rose.
Filice certainly appreciates the odorous bulb. While peeling a few cloves, he stopped, lifted them to his nose and inhaled deeply.
“You cannot imagine how good garlic smells to me,” Filice said appreciatively.
The Garlic Godfather’s advice for anyone who’s not sure how much garlic to use?
“If you are not sure how much to use, just use plenty,” he said.
