It’s taken almost a month, but I think
we’re close to recovering from The Taste Festival.
Without drawing breath after Christmas, and
barely having time for a shower, we packed up our pulled pork and sausages and
headed for Hobart early on December 27th.
We drove in convoy, sort of. Guy sped off
in the van and I lumbered along behind with the ute and trailer. We met at Ut Si Café at Perth and fueled up on ham, egg, and spinach sandwiches (funnily
enough the ham wasn’t ours, Colette had run out, but it was Matthew Evans’). At
this point I started to feel a bit excited about the week ahead of us.
When Guy and his brother Mark (Lost Pippin Cidery and Nursery) put in an application to have a cider and pork stall at The Taste I
thought they were very optimistic.
I was sure we wouldn’t get in, both being
young businesses, and having very little experience at food events. There was a
nice link though, with us growing rare breeds of livestock, and Mark working to
keep old fruit varieties alive. So the application went in, and I promptly
forgot about it.
“Bloody hell”
I think that’s what I said when Guy told me
we’d got in, but it might have been worse.
“What are two pig farmers doing going to
The Taste?”
Aware that we needed some practice at
dishing up tacos and sausages en masse, we attended some smaller events in the
couple of months leading up to The Taste. We went to the Spring Festival at the
Botanical Gardens in Hobart, the Deloraine Craft Fair, and Hobart’s Sustainable
Living Festival.
And I’m so glad we had the chance to
practice. We shifted around benches, lengthened bbq legs, graduated from spoons
to squeezy bottles for sauces and sourcream, learnt that chopped coriander
loses its aroma and plucking is worth the effort, and that Guy and Eliza work
best at opposite ends of the stall.
It was a huge challenge preparing for The
Taste while we were running around distributing a few hundred Christmas orders.
The logistics were a nightmare, and I think we worked the hardest we have so
far. But we had the most amazing staff and helpers though, like our butcher
Neville who worked 12-hour days with only a 10-minute sandwich and newspaper
break. Dane ran around sorting out everything we’d forgotten, and Elisha
brought food, humour, and organisation as we worked from morning to midnight
putting Christmas orders together.
Our new bookkeeper Andrea got the biggest
Mount Gnomon baptism of fire. She thought she was coming to help us catch up
with our records, but got thrown into sorting the orders, packaging, cleaning, rostering,
and counseling! Guy’s sister Lauren cryovacked every single ham without a
complaint, but may never eat ham again. Mark looked after everything at the
Hobart end: bumping in, worrying about stall layout, signage, refrigeration,
cash registers etc.
So, you can see that by the time we
actually got to The Taste we were hardly running on fresh legs.
As we drove in on the first day, I felt
like I was 14 again, standing in the wings at the eisteddfod ready to play my
first cornet solo. I wanted to vomit and I wanted to back out and scratch from
the event.
To my complete surprise, the day went
really well. Our staff sorted out their jobs among themselves, and we survived
the first lunchtime rush. Ian Parmenter and his team of judges came around and
tasted the pulled pork taco, and while it was lovely for him to come around the
back of the stall to talk pigs and have his photo taken with me, I thought that
would be the height of the excitement.
But we WON the “taste plate”! It’s the top
prize for a small dish priced at $8 or under. Suddenly the line grew from a few
people interested in our story and free range pork, to an endless line of
punters wanting ‘one of those pork things I heard about’.
We’re not fancy chefs at all, and we’ve got
an awful lot to learn about food, but I think the taco went well because it was
fresh and real. The pulled pork was literally just pork – no seasoning – it had
just been cooked all day in fat. The salsa was fresh: chopped in time to the
shuffling of the customers in line. (Knife-wielding Carol chopped tomatoes - from the Brandsemas who have been growing them for more than 50 years,
chillies, onions, cabbages, and apples for a total of 70 hours accompanied by
Neil Diamond and others). The sourcream was organic and came from Elgaar Farm and we
managed to source almost all the coriander from our friend Graeme (Thirlstane Gardens) in the
north-west.
We wanted to show that you don’t have to
work in a restaurant to be able to produce yummy food – you just need really
good quality ingredients. But we’ve learnt so much from talking to chefs who
use our products, and from our enthusiastic, experimental customers. We really
hope more producers will be inspired to have a go at food events, and bring the
consumer closer to the grower.
We’d like to thank our wonderful staff and
volunteers who may have not been fully aware of what they were getting
themselves into. At one stage we had six Robertsons working on the stall: Mark
with his cider, builder-cum-bbq-er Dane, twins Allie and Lauren, and mum
Denise, and Guy.
Guy and I started The Taste race as though
it was a sprint, and on day three when we hit the wall and realised it was
actually a marathon, our wonderful workers let us rest and filled the gaps.
We’ve been trying to have a little break
during January – in between catching up on farm jobs and attending the usual
markets.
But soon we’ll be back on the taco
production line… Festivale is on in Launceston from February 8 – 10,
Devonport’s Taste the Harvest is on March 10, and before we know it we’ll be at
Agfest from May 2 – 4.
See you there!
