Taste Test: Everything We Ate (And Some Things We Wish We Hadn’t) At The Auckland Food Show

This story contains meat, dairy, nuts and ice cream made from 13 per cent cauliflower.

If you can eat it, you will find it at the Auckland Food Show. If you can’t, go back next year — someone will have absolutely invented it.

“This is supposed to be the quiet, chilled-out day,” said one dazed vendor. She never finished her sentence because seven customers were queuing to buy five boxes of posh poppers for $25 with a free cooler bag.

Four days of feasting was officially underway and Viva was a fly on the wall at the last place you’d want to find an actual fly. Top take homes? Mint chocolate ice cream is really having a moment. Venison is a mainstream meat. And cashew nuts have come a very long way since cashew chicken.

The exhibition halls smelled like dinner and there was plenty to wash it down with.

A man in a suit was hawking high-grade sparkling mānuka honey in a can. “Never been done before!” he said. “Have it with your vodka! I did it last night and I’m doing it again tonight!” It’s possible he had also done it that morning, but it was 10.30am and I had just sampled a 4 per cent alcohol ginger beer, so who was I to judge.

“It’s a bit sweet,” I said to the ginger-bearded salesman. “Should I try the darker version?” It’s the same, he replied, “but it also contains rum”.

There’s an old Food Show saying: If you fry the cheese, they will come. The mushroom with parmesan Posh Poppers were okay, but the crumbed camembert with cranberry sauce and zero irony version was selling like it was 1989.

The Food Show is a bun fight. Literally. Yesterday’s ticketed preview was sold out. For the next three days, thousands of trolley-towing consumers will crowd into the Auckland Showgrounds sampling everything from gold-flaked champenoise to crispy dried mussels.

“Hands up who would like an out-of-body experience?”

Annabelle White was up the front of the Neff Cooking Theatre, urging home cooks to pair dessert wine with almost-expired “manager’s special” blue cheese. Want to look like a wine expert? Sniff. Slurp. Clench your teeth and suck in air like your life depends on it. “Then just say every herb and stone fruit you can think of.”

Julie Goodwin was next on stage. The inaugural Australian MasterChef winner was making her famous fish soup. The tomato and capsicum base is splattering worse than a kid with a squeezy sauce bottle. “A question people often ask me,” Goodwin said, “is who does the clean-up on MasterChef? The answer is the art department.” (They probably didn’t imagine that, she reflected, when they were getting their university degrees).

It was almost lunchtime, and the crowds kept coming. “I have a really strange allergy to protein,” said a woman, miraculously still alive and perusing the aisles in the hall where everything from the cream cheese to the ice cream contained no actual cream. A faux meat mince needed more salt; a cashew cheese needed, well, cheese. I sampled the mint chip, chocolate and strawberry flavoured vegan ice cream that was made from 13 per cent cauliflower and bought four packs to take home.

In the bottom of my handbag was a small, broken forest of toothpicks and wooden spoons (where were the rubbish bins?) but I was not just here for sausage chunks and almond butter. At Temuka Pottery the prettiest plates were the prettiest pink. Pudding Barbie? Chip’n Onion Dip Barbie? At the Ironclad Pan Co, they offered a three-generation, 100-year replacement guarantee. (Consider their beeswax, kawakawa and grapeseed frying pan conditioning balm the $15 Father’s Day gift tip that basically means this Viva Premium subscription has paid for itself).

I ate goat butter (vaguely goaty) and expensive butter (very buttery) and asked the man selling charcoal-infused noodles why. “Charcoal is very, very good for you,” he said. I took mine via the delightfully charred edge of a limited edition smoky-tangy-cheesy burger patty pre-made in Dunedin. “Cheffy patty!” said the aproned purveyor of very good goods.

This year’s Food Show features 270-and-counting exhibitors. Enter with a wine glass attached to a lanyard and a firm plan. For example: Regular cheese before the vintage cheese; strawberry milk from Fiji before the beer from Fiji. Organic turmeric and cacao latte will coat your throat like a mushroom soup; an actual mushroom drink promises to combat brain fog. If we are what we eat, then yesterday I was free salami samples and a corn chip dolloped with 27 varieties of hot sauce.

The Food Show is on at the Auckland Showgrounds, July 25-28.