A tempting taste of what is on offer in Dingle
From garlic snails to delicious vegan desserts, enjoyed her trip to the famous food festival in the Kerry town.
Dingle Food Festival— it’s mentioned in hushed tones of reverence when foodie folk in other towns get together to organise their own food events.
Held during a weekend in October, it’s the magical combination of fun things to do that makes Dingle so great, plus the fact that it’s one of the most visited tourist spots in Ireland.
In its first year, I was invited to be a judge at the Blás na hÉireann awards which features artisan and supermarket foods and drinks.
The products come from all four corners of the island and are nibbled on, tasted and deliberated over by a large number of judges, all known for their pernicketiness when it comes to food and drink.
The awards are so well-respected now that a simple sticker stating that your jam, sausage or sauce was considered so highly and passed all the tests for taste, ease of preparation and packaging, can change the course of your business.
We are now, as shoppers, keenly aware of the silver and gold stickers that adorn pots and packets in aisles across the whole range of food shops and farmers markets. But Blás is just one aspect of this culinary knees-up where the town of Dingle is transformed into a feast of festivities.
Visitors are in a virtual theme park of food where you can taste all manner of treats from garlic cooked snails, to rainwater water kefir, good old- fashioned black puddings, raw chocolate, home-grown oats, rainbow salads, nut burgers, cheese with Guinness in it and all while strolling around, wishing you had worn bigger pants.
The taste trail gives food lovers a chance to go on a magical mystery tour with their taste buds and a book of tickets that entitles the bearer to a small plate of some delicious comestible like meat nsung or a heavenly chocolate brownie, or a sausage and pudding with your pint, the choice is endless and the holder can wander around at their own pace enjoying nibbles across the many places taking part, not all of them eateries either.
Dingle is not only blessed with some of the best restaurants — think Out of the Blue, Novo Cento, the Chart House, Doyle’s and the legendary Half Door — it also has a fine crop of boutiques selling beautiful crafts from artists that work in the very studio that they sell from.
You can visit shops to see lovely leather belts being made, pottery and silverware, and one of my favourites, Holden Leather. Holden handcraft amazing handbags and leather-bound notebooks.
The festival is family friendly with children welcome everywhere and lots of street music to keep everyone entertained.
Cookery demonstrations from some of the country’s renowned chefs are free, workshops from the likes fermenting and others talking about keeping chickens, are all aimed at sustainability in food and farming, yet nothing preachy.
The small and winding streets are packed with hungry heads, looking for the next nibble, and there is so much to choose from.
I put on my foodie hat and wandered the little lanes as the heady scents of such a diverse mix of foods filled the air, but I was looking for something a little bit more, out there.
I found the very thing in the form of Kerry Escargot, based in Firies in Killarney, Vincent Scott and Tomas Gricunas have teamed up to get Irish people converted to chowing down on a different breed of the little-horned beast that is usually chowing down on our garden plants. Eat them before they eat you, or your food at least.
But the escargot used here is not the common or garden variety that we are used to.=
“This is our first year with the product,” says Vincent, a former clerk for An Post. “We’ll see how it goes. Irish people are having mixed responses as
traditionally, we don’t eat snails, but they are a lot like periwinkles so it’s not a million miles off.”
Featured on the Six One News by RTE’s Paschal Sheehy, since then the snails have taken off. “We have to have a herd licence from the department of agriculture,” says Tomás. “And we are tested every three months”.
How are these snails different from our annoying, slimy salad munching garden destroyers?
“Well the ones in your garden eat everything but these are fed with a special meal and of course, lots of their favourite salad greens.”
I had to taste one, of course, drenched in delicious garlic butter it had a taste of the sea that I didn’t expect.
The second half of the animal has a texture like liver, much smoother than the front part. For my money, they taste much better than oysters, but it’s a very different thing.
From snails to chocolate, I stopped by Clare man Darren O’Connor who calls himself a feeder who worked in his father’s health food shop in Ennis, Co Clare.
When his dad asked him to develop a raw chocolate ingredient as his customers had been looking for that for some time.
I decided to give it a go and dived in head, neck and heels and started producing the raw chocolate, originally in Kilfenora but I now have a commercial kitchen built onto my house so I’m not paying rent on that which makes it much better
Magic Mayan is the chocolate that many of us will be familiar with seeing which appeals to the vegan and ‘free-from’ markets, and the product attracts lots of bloggers and chefs who use the ingredient in their recipes.
“Most dark chocolates are full of cooking oils, milk powders and emulsifiers but not this,” says Darren proudly.
“The cocoa bean is full of magnesium, potassium, zinc, chromium and has more calcium than dairy. In normal chocolate production the goodness is all burned out in the heat used to make it, but in making raw chocolate I mince rather than grind the beans which retain all the goodness.”
It’s tasty stuff and I recommend leaving a piece to melt on your tongue before sucking on its luxuriousness.
Virginia O’Garra keeps popping up on my radar and for good reason, the Texas-born Cork woman is responsible for the My Goodness range of delicious vegan food.
If I could live beside Virginia then it would be so easy to eat healthy and tasty, colourful food like this all the time.
“At the stall in Mahon market, we do vegan Tex-Mex food which lends itself perfectly to being plant based,” says Virginia.
The stall features a lot of ferments from funky carrots to sauerkrauts and, mind-blowingly, water kefir and kombucha.
I sampled the corn taco, a deep fried delight filled with smoky, silky re-fried beans and served with bright salads and ferments.
I was given a zingy and sour chewy sweet on a stick as a palate cleanser but I had to go back and try some of the beautiful raw and vegan desserts. This is amazing food.
Onwards down by the water, I saw many a man’s dreams come true — a jeep that is a bar on wheels. While never ever advocating that you should drink and drive, Dave Cummins, who runs the bar on wheels, or drives it, I should say, is a happy man in his job.
It’s the Porterhouse in Dublin who are responsible for this clever gimmick.
Porterhouse is a well-known micro-brewery and the same family as the Dingle Distillery.
With fine craft beers like Brain Blásta and many much-loved IPAs, keep your eyes peeled for the clever beer truck at a food event near you.
As the weekend wrapped up and tired looking chefs gathered on streets, smoking and business owners were out sweeping up their patch of road, it felt like the town of Dingle is just delighted with itself for doing such a sterling job.
I couldn’t leave town without a stroll along the pier to take in the stunning views from the town.
Dingle has it going on and has turned a once-purely seasonal tourist resort into a thriving food destination on an international scale.
With fish and chips in hand, I headed home across the Conor Pass and took in the views, we really live on a beautiful island.
