Pesto everything, pickled onion-flavoured cheese and new ways to consume your greens. We report from the first day of the Auckland Food Show, which runs until July 28 at Auckland Showgrounds.
They came, they saw, they consumed.
No stomach was unstuffed, no free sample left behind. By midday, the average
The Auckland Food Show is a bunfight. A place where people deliberately pay to bite off more than they should probably chew.
“Do you just drink this like a juice?” I asked, passing over my cup for its third refill. The woman at the Kiwi Crush stand smiled. I caught the words “digestive support” and “alternative to laxatives” and fled. I had quite recently ingested 14 varieties of sausage and a small slab of pure pork fat.
Take this reportage with a grain of (Opito Bay) salt. Its furikake is excellent on avocado toast and a chat with the company owner who dehydrates the Coromandel ocean for a living will put your home pantry humidity complaints into serious perspective.
Around 250 exhibitors are at this year’s Food Show, which runs until Sunday at the Auckland Showgrounds. Christchurch had its turn in April and, in October, the annual pageant of gluttony heads to Wellington. I asked a regular attendee if there were observable regional differences.
“In Wellington,” she said, “people get much drunker.”
And in Christchurch? “There was a lot of meat.”
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Advertise with NZME.Key Food Show trends over time include The Cacao Years; that food show when the hottest thing since chillis was chillis; and, most recently, products promoting wellness. Eat your greens (three bags of baby leeks and a free lettuce for $10 from The Fresh Grower) but also take your hemp drops, available on a “members only” basis from first-time exhibitor Kure – 400 subscribers and counting, according to the man on the stand that the show programme bills as a purveyor of “potent and full spectrum CBD oils”.
Last year, everybody was selling ice cream. This year, Little Lato was scooping something stained with charcoal dust and asking people to guess the flavour. “Cherry?” said the woman next to me. “Pineapple?” I said. The correct answer was blueberry but I think my tastebuds were still processing a miniature cup of ‘shroom elixir.
Meanwhile, at the NEFF cooking theatre, MasterChef Australia contestant turned judge Poh Ling Yeow was demonstrating how to make potstickers.
“Just as a precursor,” she told the standing-room-only crowd, “I’m not that great live. I’m pretty chaotic. Forty per cent of the time I do this demonstration I burn the dumplings.”
Also, said Poh, the recipe in the programme was wrong. It was okay to use all regular flour. “You don’t have to go to an Asian grocery store, God forbid.” The mature faux blonde beside me laughed out loud and I imagined poking her with a chopstick.
Meanwhile, on the show floor, ready-mades were flavour of the day. Witness “fish and chippy toppers” (25% fish, 15% potato fries and 42 references to food numbers) and slow-cooked shredded meat in a vacuum-sealed bag that you boil from frozen. I had earlier been presented with hummus in a bag that had an 18-month shelf life and a pate that could be kept for four years. When the apocalypse comes, some people’s bunkers will be tastier than others.
It was not a good year to be a basil plant or tap water. I sampled way too many things that subverted pesto (ravioli yes, cheese maybe, fermented a hard no) and water (just add all-natural drops and powders!). Emperor, clothes et cetera.
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I discovered rillettes were the new pate, biscuits were the new coffee cups and the cheeseboard is in its scamorza era. The only Brat-adjacent thing I saw was wurst.
Pickled onion cheese might be one of those things that is only delicious in context and that context might be 10.15am on a Thursday when you’ve just had a peanut butter whiskey, but I’ll let you know, because I bought two blocks. My notes record that I also thoroughly enjoyed the smoked and grown-up metamorphosis of mussel spat first collected at Ninety Mile Beach and a 92% grated Agria potato hashbrown from a 21-year-old Wellington-based company. Also, that chef and restaurateur Josh Emett can make a pasta meal in under 12 minutes and, in his opinion, Gwyneth Paltrow is “a bloody good cook”.
Incredibly, in the VIP room (Colin Mathura-Jeffree wore a miniature fairy bread brooch, Annabelle White ate a beef sausage) lunch was being served. I passed on the five types of salad, two hot pasta dishes and triple-glazed ham on the bone with freshly baked artisan breads and New Zealand butter. I had already eaten.
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