One of the more underrated food events in town returned after a year hiatus. Orie’s Garlic Fest which celebrates all things’ garlic — with ready-to-eat garlicky grub, garlic beverages, garlic salts, seasonings, baked goods, honeys, jams, and more, brought out many vendors and foodies to Public at the Brickyard.
The event took over the entire Brickyard space along with the alley way just north of the building along with a part of Rock Island where the street was closed off from traffic.
The huge festival, which in recent years has taken place at Eberly Farms, highlights the many facets of Wichita’s local scene: artisans, makers, farmers and ranchers, musicians, and foodies of all kinds. Let’s not forget the garlic! It’s where you’ll find the widest variety of premium grade, organically grown garlic bulbs for culinary use or fall planting.
I couldn’t walk away without purchasing some of their signature smoked garlic artisanal salt.
I swung by Orie’s Garlic Fest to help judge the friendly competition, where I was joined by Fert the Foodie and Instagram food blogger, @bottomlesspit_ict. We were tasked with trying out as many vendors as possible to determine winners in four different categories.
In the end, Mokko Cuisine was our pick for Best Overall Winner with their garlic fried rice.
Our pick for Most Garlicky was the Black Garlic Chocolate Heater from The White House Bakery. They also had Smoked Garlic Sugar cookies and Black Garlic Chocolate Chip cookies.
For Most Creative, we chose the Garlic Lemonade from Serenity Farms.
The final award was an honorable mention of someone who had a fantastic dish but just missed out of the three previous awards. That award went to Public and their ice cream with black garlic porter cake, baked with Central Standard Brewing Keef Richards.
We had some other awesome food and drinks such as a Bao-Wurst with Garlic Currywurst which also happened to be the only food item I forgot to take a picture of. We also had a garlic pesto pizza, BLT with garlic aioli, garlicky Farmer’s Smash Burger, garlic rosemary fries, Bavarian soft pretzel rods with Orie’s Farm Seasoning Salt and black garlic aioli all from Public.
There was a garlic rosemary bagel with a black garlic & chive schmear from Everything & the Bagel Bread Company.
Two more interesting drinks were the Bloody Mary Kombucha with garlic salt rim from Apollo Fermentations and some sort of garlic chai tea from TeaTaze.
Even Belle & Buddy’s Kitchen was on hand showing off some of their jams mixed with garlic.
There was so much garlic goodness to be had on Sunday. I’m pretty sure vampires will be avoiding me for at least the rest of this week.
Big thanks to Orie’s Farm Fresh for the invite to judge. It’s always fun trying people’s different spins and takes on dishes when they have to incorporate an ingredient. This was my second time attending the Garlic Fest and certainly won’t be my last.
Have an event you would like for us to come cover? Email us with the details of the event. We are always open to suggestions on fun things to do in Wichita!
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