Having eaten our own weight in treats, we sloped back home, happy and fat. It’s a great day out, kids or not. If you love food but can’t make it to the Festival in person (always the first full weekend of September), you can still find listings of the amazing producers - many of whom have national mail order services - on the festival website at www.foodfestival.co.uk
Joanne Roach is the owner of The Foodies, which helps very young children to start cooking or gardening. www.thefoodies.org
Joanne Roach is the owner of The Foodies, which helps very young children to start cooking or gardening. www.thefoodies.org
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Ludlow Food Festival - A Foodie Family Day Out
The Castle also hosts workshops, lectures, tastings and demonstrations from Michelin chefs and other food and sustainability experts - events as distinct as ‘Cooking With Goats Cheese’, ‘Drying And Curing Meat’ and ‘Omega 3 vs Omega 6 - A Wake Up Call?’.
The trails are probably the most famous thing about the Ludlow Festival and people come from all over the country to take part. For beer lovers there is an Ale Trail, where you collect a little glass on a necklace and tour the participating pubs sampling and rating real ales. The Bread Trail tours the artisan bakers, voting on scrummy speciality breads. But for most people the name of Ludlow is synonymous with sausages, and for good reason - The Sausage Trail is legendary and worth the trip all by itself. Visitors pay £3.50 to get a voting form, then tour the town visiting butchers stalls and sampling five freshly cooked sausages competing for the hotly contested Best Sausage Competition. You then mark the sausages out of 10 points and submit your voting form in return for your favourite sausage in a hot dog bun with relish. Genius. Tickets are much sought after and queues can be long, but the rewards are worth the wait.
Not surprisingly my children (Jacob, aged 7 and Anna, aged 5) were only interested in finding the sausages. For a week before the festival I was drawing odd looks in the street by answering the question “How many sleeps is it till the sausages?”. They were not disappointed and neither were my husband and I. Can there be a better way to spend a Saturday morning than to wander round eating sausages? After sampling pork and spring onion, pork and apple, a rare breed grainy sausage, an oriental spicy sausage and a chilli sausage, we all voted for the pork and apple sausage from Griffiths. We were not alone, it was the overall festival winner.
I was a little disappointed that some of the family features from previous years (such as the NFU wooden cow for children to milk, and the inflatable pig cinema) were absent this year. But our kids did participate in the Ludlow College children’s treasure hunt, following a trail to find rubber ducks in the windows of shops all over town and pick out their favourite foods from each shop.
After lunch of course comes pud. In previous years we have queued up the stairs to scoff scoops of a range of ‘mmmm’-inducing home made puddings at the Methodist Church. But this year we were tempted by the most exquisite cupcakes from Queenies Cupcakery, and in my case by a truly wonderful gluten free chocolate cake from a little company called Caboose, which had none of the powdery-ness of many gluten free cakes but was gooey and luscious.
The busy Castle grounds, full of amazing produce
A demo on the Precious Earth Stage
What would your favourite food be from this shop?
Queenie's cakes look almost too good to eat......... almost!
The Ludlow Food Festival is one of the longest established and biggest food festivals and I am lucky enough to have it on my doorstep. I’ve been a stallholder there for the last couple of years with my own business, but this year I had a year off. So it was wonderful to be able to bundle the kids and a hungry husband into the car and take our place as normal visitors again.
The Ludlow Food Festival has three elements: the hub inside the Castle grounds (which you pay to go into); the market in the square; and the Trails. The Castle houses marquees full of amazing artisan food businesses - masterpiece cakes and pastries, rediscovered old favourites such as mutton and Welsh Oggie, mouthwatering Indian titbits, and amazing local farm projects.
The Ludlow Food Festival has three elements: the hub inside the Castle grounds (which you pay to go into); the market in the square; and the Trails. The Castle houses marquees full of amazing artisan food businesses - masterpiece cakes and pastries, rediscovered old favourites such as mutton and Welsh Oggie, mouthwatering Indian titbits, and amazing local farm projects.
