Eat Drink Blog 2012 - Adelaide Central Markets

I’ve only ever been to Adelaide once and it was when Qantas had put us up in a five star hotel overnight as there were some issues which prevented them from flying us back to Perth. I wasn’t complaining as I had an unexpected extra day off work and a day in Adelaide. We didn’t have time to really venture out to check out the wine regions or had much of a foodie plan. So like, my Eat Drink Blog 2012 roomy Gastromony, I was oblivious to Adelaide’s amazing food and wine offerings before attending Eat Drink Blog’s 2012 conference.

Am excited to say, Day 1 of Eat Drink Blog 2012 gave me a pretty good gastronomic introduction to Adelaide 😉 The day started off at the Adelaide Central Markets, us WA food bloggers (Blue Apocalypse, Chomp Chomp and Gastromony) and Sydney food blogger Corridor Kitchen (Blue Apocalypse’s roomy) did a bit of our own tour of the markets before our official guided tour…

First things first, we went and got our coffee fix at The Grind…

I had my first taste of The Yoghurt Shop - I’m told the yoghurt was made locally daily and I really could taste the difference…

I went the mango frozen yoghurt, which was incredibly creamy & tasted just like mango, but I really did crave the honeycomb yoghurt (see pic above), which looked amazing.

After our own foodie tour of the markets, we went to register for the Eat Drink Blog 2012 conference. The lovely Erin from She cooks, She gardens was our group’s official Adelaide Central Market tour guide, first stop was the Providore stall.

Although my skin reacts to chocolate, I couldn’t resist this amazing chocolate fondue…

We had the chocolate fondue out of a shot glass - it was so good!

This is Mark Gleeson, Providore stall holder filling our shot glasses with chocolate…

The mushroom man tells us about his mushroom shop and intrigued us with his black garlic…

We visited a number of stalls during our guided tour of the Adelaide Central Markets, these were some of the many things, I found interesting:

• O’Connell Meats smoke their own porterhouse and age it for 27 days.
• Leo’s Cheese Bar has been a stallholder for 40 years (impressive!). The owner tells us blue cheese, feta and brie are all equally as popular.
• Barbara owner of Barossa Fine Foods introduced us to duck galantine, which was de-boned stuffed duck served cold. It was like ham 😉 but duck if that makes sense. Barbara also tells us all their small goods are gluten free which meant our lovely gluten intolerant WA food blogger Chomp Chomp was able to have a taste. I was surprised that Barossa Fine Foods despite having 8 retail outlets and a factory which supplies product nationally is still to this day a family business.

There was so much more to the Central Adelaide Markets, but I’d be writing forever and the pics would be endless so I hope this gives you a good taste of what I experienced. What I loved about the Central Adelaide Markets was the variety. There was an abundance of stalls offering fresh produce, meat, breads, dairy products…and while you’re there you certainly won’t go hungry with all the food options available.

After the guided tour of the Adelaide Central Markets, we were offered the option of a Writing Workshop with Dianne Jacob or drinking at the Barossa Valley - it was a no brainer, of course I chose visiting Adelaide’s renowned wine region