Sunday 10 September 2017

11. Ludlow Food Festival 2017 - Part 1.



  Lucy The Labrador and I have spent a delightful weekend at this year's Ludlow Food Festival - this is our third consecutive year and we remain as devoted to coming to this enjoyable event as the first year we turned up to this premier Food Festival. The festival was founded in 1995 being first held in the town square and then moving the next year into the grounds of the castle itself.


  The "Sausage Trail" is Lucy's favourite activity of the year. It was begun in 2000 and involves a walk around town stopping off at various sites to sample and give a judgement on the wares of a particular butcher or the other. This year there were five butchers presenting their excellent products- 4 from Ludlow itself and one from Ditton Priors. Lucy's a fairly generous marker when it comes to judging various types of food but she did indeed show a general enthusiasm for all the sausages that she got to eat. Myself, I like a peppery sausage and opted to give top marks to Reg May's butchers shop in Ditton Priors. The queue of sausage enthusiasts waiting to sample the wares of one of the Ludlow butchers was far too long so we missed me out on that particular sausage and try as I might I couldn't find the location of one of the other shrines of sausage consumption so that too did not get sampled this year. The map of sausage sampling sites included with the £4.50 ticket was poor and sign-posting was inadequate and close to non-existent. The organisers will need step up their game I think given the huge numbers of people in town bent on tracking down their dream sausages.
  The distance to be covered to visit each site has been increased this year and involves walking up and down two steep hills and while I'm sure this is a positive move from the health point of view (particularly as the participants are clearly consuming excessive calories in the form of all those delightful sausages) and it does give an added opportunity to visit more of this beautiful town during the course of the trail, I personally would have liked not to have had to exert myself quite so much and Lucy tended to agree with me.


  The trail's first port of call took participants down the hill to Dinham Mill where the Bib Gourmand-winning Green Cafe is situated. It's a beautiful site, Lucy had a swim in the shallow part of the river and there were plenty of other dogs out too with their owners all looking anticipatory of the pleasures to come. By the top we climbed up the hill to the castle again and made our way to St. Laurence's church where the second stage was sited the promised rain showers had begun but the huge crowds were not daunted by the intermittently poor weather.



  Then it was off again, down the hill to Ludlow Brewing Co. where the participants in the coincidental Ale Trail were sampling the wares provided at that site before tucking into the sausages available outside. The sun had come out again and there was general air of busy contentment all around. This site was the home of the sausage for us. Peppery and mildly spicy it was quite memorable and I confess I helped myself to a little piece of Lucy's sausage as well as consuming my own.
  We headed back up Corve Street to find an enormous queue in Tower Street waiting at the Sausage Trail station located there to obtain their sample of this particular little pleasure but by then Lucy and I were a little too tired to wait for what looked as though it was going to be twenty minutes or so to get our sausages. So, unable to locate the final station, we headed back to Ludlow Castle itself where the main events were taking place.


  Searching around the various street food stalls for what was to be lunch I decided it really was time for me to try one of The Beefy Boys much praised burgers. I'd looked at them in the past but never quite got round to sampling their products. How foolish I had been. I am not a great burger enthusiast - there are too many frankly vile such dishes around to make me willingly fork out a lot of money for the things. But "The Beefy Boys" burger, I found, is as magnificent a dish as can be found in this kingdom and probably even beyond its boundaries.
  The Beefy Boys Co. produced a burger from 100% 21 Day aged Herefordshire beef and in 2014 came first with the product in The United Kingdom and second overall in the World Food Championships. The burger I ate in Ludlow this weekend certainly justified The Beefy Boys Co. awards received by it. It was magnificent - a delicious flavour and wonderfully succulent. Definitely prize-winning. It came with various accompaniments but to be honest I barely noticed the bacon, cheese and jalapeño mayonnaise - it was all about the burger itself and the wonderful and perfectly cooked meat inside it. A memorable item of food indeed.



  I attended a number of the talks and cooking demonstrations taking place at the Festival and I will describe those in the next Blog.


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