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The Fancy Food Show: A Foodathlon

Posted by Ed Levine, July 10, 2007 at 7:30 PM

I've just completed food's version of a triathlon (a foodathlon?), a two day walk-through of the Fancy Food Show at New York City's Javits Center. I swam through hundreds of adult sodas, biked my way though miles of healthy snacks, and ran through a virtual United Nations of country food booths. What did I find in the miles of aisles?

Read on with some antacid at the ready.

More mustards, salsas, chocolates, hams, bacons, cheeses, and adult soft drinks than you have ever seen in your life. It's hard to get excited by mustard or salsa or crackers, but chocolate, that's something to get excited about. There were lots of chocolate makers I already know and have written about, like Fran's incomparable caramels with smoked sea salt and Andrew Schott's Garrison Confections—amazing toffee and lemon cupcake bonbons. But I discovered Poco Dolce's killer dark chocolate tiles with almonds topped with sea salt, and burnt caramel tiles that both immediately go into my chocolate top ten list. Non-chocolate lovers should note that Poco Dolce also makes a not-too-sweet torron that may be the first torrone I've ever really liked.

Bacons and hams were omnipresent this year, and I couldn't resist tasting my old favorites from Nueske's and Edwards & Sons. I even managed to discover some bacons and hams I haven't tasted before, like Broadbent Hams and Vermont Smoke & Cure's excellent bacon and ham.

There were too many great cheeses to sample from the United States and elsewhere. I loved the Cypress Grove Chevre with truffles and Mrs. Bells Blue, an amazingly complex and surprisingly unsalty Irish farmstead blue cheese. I even met Mrs. Bell, who was a lovely woman very passionate about her cheese.

There were so many nonalcoholic adult sodas and soft drinks being sipped that I half expected to see Coca-Cola and Pepsi executives overrunning the convention floor. Most were pretty mundane or worse (I tried a mint soda that tasted like what the dental hygienist gives you after you've had a cavity filled. But some of them were refreshingly unsweet and clean-tasting, like the delicious Kristall lingonberry soda from Sweden.

Finally, I had an all-natural peanut butter that has me contemplating moving away from Jif, my peanut butter of choice for the last 50 years and the second-place finisher in a recent Serious Eats taste test. Cream-Nut Peanut Butter, manufactured by the Koeze Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had the perfect balance between deep peanutty taste and salt that I have been craving for years. Oh, yeah, I found a really good grape jam to go with it, made by Peanut Butter & Co. It actually tasted like grapes instead of corn syrup. What a radical concept.

I hope all of you understand that I sacrifice my svelte figure in order to taste my way through thousands of booths to bring you the best new stuff I find on Serious Eats ;)

So that's it until next year, when I will have to break in a new pair of shoes to walk the Summer Fancy Food Show.

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Tags: Fancy Food Show, NYC