Pizza Fever fired up Don Tomás brand. Here’s how the Roseville hot sauce took off
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, many people turned to new hobbies to pass the time in lockdown. Some tested trending TikTok recipes, others set up home gyms, and many embraced crafts like crochet. For Tom Cianci in Roseville, the quiet weeks at home became a time for experimenting with homemade hot sauce in large backyard vats.
“We started making these sauces and goofing off with different condiments,” Cianci said. “It was honestly kind of a way to fill time for my daughter while she was home. You know, you can only play Clue so many times.”
During one of these experiments, Cianci sat down with his lunch of Earl Grey tea and a slice of leftover pizza topped with his hot sauce. While taking a sip of tea to wash down a bite of pizza, he tasted an unexpected combination of flavors, emulating Italian sausage.
“I accidentally grabbed the wrong (tea) bag ... it was fennel tea,” he said. “Those flavors all just kind of went ‘boom’ in my mouth.”
From that point, Pizza Fever was born, a distinctly Italian-tasting sauce accented with a fiery, vinegary punch from fermented Brazilian and Caribbean malagueta peppers.
After refining his recipe and getting unanimous approval from friends, Cianci worked with a contract packager to make a handful of bottles of the sauce under the name Don Tomás, mainly to give out as gifts. “The Don,” as Cianci says, is the face of the brand and his eloquent, larger-than-life alter ego.
His 6-year-old daughter, Aria, encouraged him to begin selling the product, going so far as to research how to list a food product on Amazon, while the Cianci reached out to regional grocery stores like Raley’s and Nugget Markets.
“Short story much longer, (we) ended up getting it on Amazon and it ended up selling into ... like 43 states,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re very, very small, but it’s just been fun to kind of watch that grow.”
After Cianci managed to get Pizza Fever into select Raley’s stores across the Interstate 80 corridor, he brought Aria, now 11, to see proof of the family’s pandemic project’s success.
“She thought that was really cool,” Cianci said. “She was a really big part of it, because I honestly don’t know that I would have (started selling the sauces) if it wasn’t for her.”
While Pizza Fever is the brand’s flagship product, Cianci was eager to diversify his offerings, pulling inspiration from global travels with his wife prior to Aria’s arrival. His saffron and African fatalii pepper sauce, designed to complement lean meats like chicken and fish, has become a constant bestseller, frequently selling out on his website and Amazon storefront.
Another spicy pick combines South American tradition with Japanese heat, adding shishito peppers to acidic, herb-based chimichurri, an excellent topper for beef and my favorite Argentinian street food, choripán, a grilled chorizo in a French bread bun. Rounding out Cianci’s sauce quartet is an impossibly sweet hibiscus barbecue sauce, which features Peruvian aji panca pepper and a stunningly low single gram of sugar per serving.
In recent months, he has been marketing his sauces at food expos and trade shows, with his most recent stop at the Terra Madre Americas festival at the end of September, where he sold out of his sauces all three days of the weekend.
While tabling, Cianci met a pair of growers who were interested in collaborating to grow the international peppers he uses in his sauces. One of the growers was Matt Jones, who runs Honest Acre Farm, a regenerative farm based out of Linden, a small community northeast of Stockton. The small-scale farm grows a wide variety of herbs, fruits and vegetables, including peppers from around the world.
“Only at a show like (Terra Madre) you can get those kind of contacts,” Cianci said. Going forward, he said he plans to source as many of his chilies as possible from the Central Valley farm.
Cianci is now working on a new sauce with Honest Acre, using exotic chilies grown at the San Joaquin County farm. He kept details tightly under wraps, offering no hints of what to expect.
He said he is planning on soft-launching the upcoming sauce on the company’s Instagram page in the next few weeks, with a riddle that indicates what the two main ingredients are. As an added bonus, Cianci said whoever is able to solve the riddle successfully will receive two gift sets of his four sauces.
“Our whole thing is we try to do something completely new,” he said. “If it tastes like anything that’s already in your refrigerator, I don’t have any interest in bottling it.”
What I’m Eating
My personal ethos when trying a new pizzeria is to go simple. If a pizzaiolo can pull off a great cheese or margherita slice, I can trust they will pull off more elaborate topping combinations. However, Roma’s Pizzeria has a particularly intriguing specialty offering on its menu.
Located directly underneath the traditional margherita on the menu’s specialty pizzas section is a shrimp margherita ($28 for a 12-inch medium). What sounds like a tamer version of a briny anchovy pie is actually a masterfully blended flavor combination, with a scattering of baby shrimp infusing a subtle umami profile to each ingredient. The shrimp’s mild flavors soften the Roma tomatoes’ acidity and amplify the mozzarella cheese’s light saltiness.
Roma’s is a traditional, modest south Sacramento establishment, opened more than 50 years ago by the Guerrera family, who emigrated from Italy. Located in an unassuming strip mall cleverly beside a laundromat, the restaurant is filled with the smell of baking pizzas mingling with the neighboring fresh laundry aromas, evoking a cozy and nostalgic vibe.
While waiting for your laundry to dry, the restaurant’s cheese garlic bread ($6.95) is an ideal snack. A crunchy bread base is seasoned with a thin layer of rich garlic butter, topped with a generous serving of melty mozzarella that creates a mouthwatering cheese pull.
Roma’s Pizzeria
Address: 5743 Franklin Blvd., Lemon Hill
Hours: 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; closed Mondays
Phone: 916-421-1881
Website: romaspizzeriasacramento.com
Vegetarian options: Vegetarian salads, pizzas, pasta dishes
Drinks: Bottle and draft domestic and imported beer, Robert Mondavi wines and imported wines, soft drinks
Noise level: Quiet
Outdoor seating: None
Openings & Closings
• Downtown Yuba City opened a new coffee shop at 725 Plumas St. on Saturday. Full Circle Coffee House opened its doors Oct. 4, brewing three varieties of Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters beans alongside teas, flavored energy drinks and freshly baked pastries, according to its Instagram page.
• As Sacramento International Airport is in the throes of its major dining option overhaul, sandwich chain West Coast Sourdough was cleared for takeoff in Terminal B on Monday, Sept. 29. The restaurant opened near gate B15, across from the Famous Famiglia counter.
