SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio fire lieutenant says the special bond he shares with his father is the driving force behind getting their family’s barbecue sauce onto grocery store shelves across Texas.
“The sauce is pronounced Torcatha. I took two Scottish words. ‘Tor,’ and then ‘Catha,’ which means battle boar,” said David McCulley. “Also, my family’s name means boar. McCulley is Son of the Boar, so it describes that determination I’ve had on this journey. That’s why the logo has an aggressive-looking boar.”
Determined to share his family’s legacy with the world, the family recipe barbecue sauce hitting the shelves of Central Market was years in the making.
“It actually started in the firehouse where I would make it,” McCulley said, in part. “We would always cook for each other and eat together, and for me, it was barbecue, so I asked dad for a recipe, and he had one that had been in the family for 40 years, so I started making it from scratch, and the guys liked it. Twelve years later, something clicked.”
In addition to being in his family for 40 years, McCulley said there is truly something special about this sauce that his father has been making since he was a boy.
“It is sweet, savory, smoky, and finished with a kick,” he said. “We have a spicy, and I made a mild since my mother doesn’t like spices that much. It is just fresh and unique, unlike anything you find on the shelves.”
With his father being both his school teacher, the head of their household and a MasterChef, McCulley learned a lot from him both in the kitchen and in life.
“I still have the pit at my house that he taught me on. It is coming apart a little bit, but I made some chicken on it the other night,” said McCulley. “He is the one who taught me all about barbecue. Also, I have three pillars I go by. Strength, courage and discipline. If you put those with anything in life, you can’t fail.”
McCulley admitted to KSAT that getting to this point in his life hasn’t been easy.
“It has never been easy. The complete opposite, actually. It is hard, and you have to want it. For me, I wanted to get the legacy to the world,” he said. But if you don’t have that, there are so many ‘no’s’ that you will feel stopped. You have to have that goal constantly set, as my dad said, ‘You get told no, just brush it off and move on.”
Just like the battle bore, with that fiery determination, the sauce can now be found at 10 Central Market locations, the Pullman Market and even in France.
McCulley said he thanks his father deeply for building such a strong foundation.
“He is like me with brushing off compliments,” he said. “I tell him, ‘Hey, Dad, your sauces are in Central Market.’ He’s like, ‘It’s yours. It’s yours.’ So, when he sends me little texts of, ‘I’m proud of you,’ is there anything better than that? I would tell him I wouldn’t be the man I am today without him. He raised me the way I want to raise my children, and I couldn’t do this without him.”
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