Australia’s largest cheese festival, CheeseFest, took place last weekend at Rymill Park in Adelaide.
We arrived just after midday on Sunday and got stuck straight into the serious business of the day: sampling and learning about all the wonderful cheeses and dairy products on display from companies including Barossa Valley Cheese Company, B.-d. Farm Paris Creek, Island Pure, La Casa Del Formaggio, Milawa Cheese Company, Udder Delights, Warrnambool Cheese and Butter and Woodside Cheese Wrights.
I’m in fromage heaven.
One enterprising company, the Alexandrina Cheese Company, has come up with an unusual way to market their products with gender specific lunch packs. Chicks (their terminology) get the pear, edam and lighter Dutch cheeses that go well with white wine while dudes (also their terminology) get a pack with an apple, cheddar and the more robust cheeses that go well with the reds. Hilarious.
I duck into the Miele Celebrity Chef Marquee to find Di Mattsson and Chris Stephan from Foodbirds @ Farmgate SA showing a crowd how to make a broad bean and cheese dip with toasted pita bread and crudités of the cutest baby carrots.
I warm to their down to earth style immediately. They’re obviously really into food, not in a pretentious, see-how-clever-I-am type way but in a way that’s about using real ingredients and local produce in a very accessible way. I think they’re fantastic – someone give these gals a TV show!
I duck outside to find Kris Lloyd, Founder/Director of CheeseFest and Head Cheesemaker at Woodside Cheese Wrights on stage with Paul Wood from 12 Tables.
All this talk of food is making me hungry so I go off in search of something to eat. Luckily, there’s plenty of delicious food and drink on offer from companies including Grace the Establishment, Hotel Tivoli, James Orlando, Spice Kitchen, Brew Boys, Hart of the Barossa, Shingleback Wine, and Zema Estate.
Feeling refreshed, I duck back into the Miele Celebrity Chef Marquee to find Paul Wood from 12 Tables making a savoury tart. I’m a bit intimidated by pastry so feel encouraged when he reveals that sometimes even he doesn’t get the pastry to fit the form perfectly on the first go. It’s nice to know that even professional chefs have these moments and I’m inspired to give my mother in law’s delicious chicken pie recipe a go next week.
It’s been a fantastic day. It’s a shame the weather was so lousy on the Saturday, which undoubtedly put some people off, but the overall turnout has proven once again that CheeseFest is a hugely popular festival. Final numbers are still coming in but it looks like over 8,000 people attended this year’s festival, a big increase from last year’s crowd of 5,000.
Talking it over with a friend today, we decide that the day would have been even better if we’d had some kind of master list of cheeses that could be scribbled on. This would allow us to pinpoint our favourite types of cheeses and we could also write our own comments to remind us which sampled cheeses we favoured. After sampling so many great cheeses, you do tend to forget which ones were the standouts. I also think a Yellow Brick Road type showbag, with samples from each stall, would be really popular with the crowd. Some kind of children’s showbag would also be great fun for the little ones.
However, these are minor points. We’re extremely lucky to have the largest cheese festival in Australia here in Adelaide. Congratulations to all involved. See you there next year.
Christina Soong-Kroeger attended CheeseFest as a guest of the festival.
