Exploring Sheffield Food Festival

This weekend there has been a food festival going on in Sheffield. Street food, market stalls and local restaurants have been lined up snaking throughout the city centre. I had planned to explore it on Saturday, but the weather was so dreadful with torrential rain that I postponed until Sunday when the weather was slightly improved (although still raining)!

The first sight that greeted me was a real shire horse in a pen. This was a stand displaying naturally grown veg with plants arranged in vegetable plot style design. I’m not entirely sure what the horse was about, but I think the stall was from a local farm and they had brought along the horse to attract people. He really was a lovely specimen.

The first food stand I visited was a stand called Karkli, a new business selling pouches of Indian snacks made from fried lentil flour. I loved the spiky shape; they reminded me of spiky edged caterpillars. They were very crunchy and at first all you could taste was a savoury saltiness but there turned out to be a few cumin seeds in the mix and after a few chews you were left with an aromatic spiciness. Very good.

I then explored the rest of the stands on offer.

The Yorkshire Crisp company was giving tasters of their hand cooked tubs of crisps with some new interesting flavours. Not all of them were gluten free, but I got to taste a Hendersons Relish flavour. Hendersons Relish is a bit like Worcestershire sauce with the added benefit of being gluten free and vegetarian. Yorkshire folk are very protective and proud of this relish, (don’t ever say it’s similar to Worcestershire Sauce within anyone earshot or they get very offended) and my boyfriend eats it on everything!

I also tried a sweet chili and lime variety, which was nice but more of a paprika flavour to me and I didn’t detect the lime.

A bakery stand had some very cool Lego cupcakes. Those Lego bricks and even the little Lego men were edible!

Another stand had some beautiful looking gourmet marshmallows in a whole assortment of pastel colours and flavours. The black cherry & anise one looked amazing and such a fabulous colour.

A Mediterranean stand was selling olives, cheeses and sundried tomatoes. I tried a taster of feta and wow, it was amazing. It was more like a stiffly set cream cheese than any feta I’ve ever had before. It was so smooth and creamy, it just melted in the mouth. I bought a slice and had it with some roasted peppers for lunch today, so delicious.

I wanted to buy something for lunch from one of the pop up restaurant stands and there was quite an assortment to choose from.

Caribbean – goat curry anyone?

A selection of salads and roasted meats from The Showroom looked very inviting

I was drawn to the stand selling fat burritos stuffed with rice, beans and meat of your choice. I couldn’t have the burrito, as wheat tortillas aren’t gluten free, but I asked if I could have the filling of the burrito just on its own which they were happy to do for me. I was given a plate of a little bit of rice, bean chilli, jalapeno salsa and a couple of corn chips. I was slightly disappointed at the small portion but it was warm and filling which is what I needed as it had started raining again. The salsa had a gentle heat to it.

It made for a fun morning out, and I hope there is another event next year.