There is a moment at any good backyard cookout in Binghamton, New York, when the conversation stops. Not because someone said something wrong. Because something on the grill smells exactly right.
That smell is Salamida Spiedie Sauce doing what it has been doing since 1976 — cutting through smoke, fat, and pretension to remind everyone standing around a grill that the best food has a story behind it.
This is that story.
What is a Spiedie, Exactly?
Before you can appreciate the sauce, you need to understand what it is meant for.
A spiedie is not a kebab, even though it looks like one. The word comes from the Italian “spiedo,” meaning a spit or skewer, and the dish traces its American roots directly to the Italian immigrant communities that settled in the Southern Tier of New York in the early 20th century. Cubes of meat — traditionally lamb, though chicken and pork have long since taken over the rotation — are soaked in a marinade for anywhere between 24 hours and three days, then threaded onto skewers and grilled over moderate heat.
The finish is what sets them apart from every other skewered meat dish you have ever had. The exterior chars just enough to lock in the moisture. The inside stays tender. The flavors from the marinade — oil, vinegar, garlic, herbs — have had days to work their way into every fiber of the meat. You pull the cubes off the skewer with a piece of white Italian bread, and that bread soaks up everything left behind.
It sounds simple because it is. That is the point.
Binghamton Did Not Discover the Spiedie. It Perfected It.
Every city has a dish it is protective about. Binghamton is protective about spiedies the way Kansas City is protective about ribs or New Haven is about pizza. You can find versions of it elsewhere, and you will be politely told those versions are fine. But everyone knows where the real thing lives.
The dish was popularized in the region by Camillo Iacovelli in the 1920s, but it was the Italian neighborhood restaurants and backyard cookouts of Binghamton that turned it into something bigger than one man’s recipe. By the time the Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally became an annual event — pulling tens of thousands of people into town every August — the spiedie had already been Binghamton’s unofficial signature for decades.
The festival just made it official. If you have never attended the Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally, add it to the list. It is the kind of regional food event that reminds you why local culture is worth protecting.
Enter Rob Salamida
In 1976, Rob Salamida started selling his own spiedie sauce at state fairs across New York. He was not inventing something new. He was bottling something that people in the Southern Tier had been making in their kitchens for generations and giving it to the rest of the world.
What made Salamida’s approach different was the production method. Each ingredient is processed through separate stages during bottling, which means the spice distribution stays consistent from the top of the bottle to the bottom. There is no shaking required to get the full flavor. You open it, you pour it, and every batch of marinated meat comes out the way it should.
That consistency is a bigger deal than it sounds. Anyone who has worked with homemade marinades knows how quickly a bad batch can ruin a two-day soak. Salamida removed that variable.
The result is America’s best-selling spiedie sauce, sold in grocery stores and online, and still made with the same philosophy it launched with.
Pick up Salamida Original State Fair Spiedie Sauce on Amazon — this is the one you want to start with.
How to Actually Use It
The most common mistake people make with Salamida Spiedie Sauce is not giving it enough time.
Twenty-four hours is the floor. Forty-eight is better. If you can go seventy-two, your chicken or pork will be noticeably more tender and the herb notes from the marinade will have moved from the surface into the interior of the meat, which is where you want them.
A few practical notes from experience:
Coat every side. This sounds obvious and still gets skipped. Before the meat goes into the refrigerator, turn the pieces in the marinade until nothing looks dry. Then cover the container, not just because of cross-contamination but because the vinegar base will absorb ambient refrigerator smells if you leave it open.
Do not rush the grill. Moderate heat over a longer cook beats high heat every time with spiedies. You want the outside to develop color without the interior drying out. Keep a section of the grill at lower heat for finishing if you need to.
The bread is not optional. Soft Italian bread, the kind you can find at any good bakery, is how spiedies are served in Binghamton. You wrap the bread around the skewer and pull. The bread becomes part of the dish. Serving spiedies on a plate with a fork is technically legal but culturally questionable.
Beyond the classic preparation, the sauce works well as a standard chicken marinade for the grill, a basting sauce for pork tenderloin, and as a vinaigrette base for grain salads. The herb and vinegar profile is versatile enough to move beyond its original context without losing any of its character.
Lupo’s and the Endicott Style
No post about spiedies in Binghamton is complete without mentioning Lupo’s, which has been making Endicott-style spiedie sandwiches for decades and maintains a devoted local following that borders on reverence.
The Endicott style uses a vinegar-forward marinade with mint as a defining herb, which gives the finished sandwich a brightness that cuts through the richness of grilled meat in a way that makes you want another one before you have finished the first.
Lupo’s markets their own Endicott-style marinade separately, which means you can put both versions through a side-by-side test at home and draw your own conclusions. Doing that is a perfectly valid way to spend a weekend.
Why This Sauce Still Matters
There is no shortage of bottled marinades. The grocery store condiment aisle is a graveyard of products that promised flavor and delivered salt.
Salamida Spiedie Sauce survives and still grows because it is not trying to be everything to everyone. It is trying to be the right thing for one specific dish, made by one specific regional culture, in a way that has not needed to fundamentally change in almost fifty years.
That kind of longevity in the food business does not happen by accident. It happens because the product actually works, because the community around it keeps showing up, and because there is a story behind it worth repeating.
This is a sauce that tastes like a place. Binghamton earned it.
The Salamida Lineup Worth Having
If you are building out your grilling pantry, here is where to start:
Salamida Original State Fair Spiedie Sauce — the baseline. Lamb or chicken, 48-hour soak, bread on hand. Get it here.
Salamida Lemon Garlicious — lighter and brighter, works well on seafood and vegetables.
Salamida Chicken BBQ Sauce — the transition product for people who want familiar BBQ flavor with the Salamida production quality underneath it.
3-Pack Variety (16 oz each) — the easiest way to run your own comparison. Available on Amazon.
All of them are available through the Pints, Forks & Friends Amazon Shop, where we only list products we have actually used.
The Full Recipe
If you want to put Salamida Spiedie Sauce to work the right way, head over to our Salamida Classic State Fair Spiedie Recipe for the step-by-step breakdown — marinade ratios, timing, grilling technique, and the bread situation handled properly.
Before You Go
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