Good Food Awards - Year II

Got milk? Got crackers?

I adore cheese, coffee, jam, and chocolate so much that it's hard to believe that I could ever get enough of these foods...but I did after 30 minutes of sampling at the Good Food Awards. This was probably and only because most of these items were served straight up, without their usual accompaniments.  Imagine  sample-sized spoons of jam, fermented cabbage and cubes of cheese without bread or crackers or hotdogs, and tiny cups of black coffee without milk. 

Had Whole Foods and Gilt, sponsors of this event, donated crackers and bread and milk, I am sure that more products would have been sold.

Italian cookies from Galla Rulli in New York City.  Available on Gilt.  Recommended!

In this second year of the event, the Good Food Awards charged $5 per person ($12 more if you wanted to try beer and spirits) and had fewer sampling booths.  But it was still fun to meet all the purveyors from New York, Utah, NC, Washington, Oregon, and of course California and to get bites and sips of their wares.

Not surprisingly, my favorite section was chocolate.  I can eat chocolate in any form without any accompaniments and still be in a state of bliss.  All the chocolate I tried (15 different kinds?) had a clean mouth-feel and were made with just a few ingredients: cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter and vanilla.  Yet they all had distinct flavors, emanating from the beans used.  When ingredients are simple and pure, the beauty of the natural flavor can emerge. I will devote a separate post to this delicious topic.

Apart from chocolate, my favorite product was these little almonds.  Way smaller than the kind you normally see, these were flavored with smoked salt and Herbs en Provence.