This weekend is the Food Film Festival 2016, celebrating its 10th year at the AMC 25 Empire in Times Square. I remembered the last time I’ve been to the Food Film Festivals of many years past, the venues were much smaller and had this indie feel but very good food were served and cool short food films were shown.
This year, my friend and I attended Edible Adventures #15: Taste of Louisiana so most of our food served tonight is delicious Creole cooking. The exclusion are a select amount of films that focused on pizza, peach cobbler, and spring roll. During the VIP pre-party, there were a good assortment of food doled out — shrimp etouffe, dirty rice, shucked oysters topped with yellow mustard and relish, fresh fried beignets, and biscuits filled with apple butter. If anything as a diner, your timing of eating the beignets from the fryer is crucial for enjoyment. The dirty rice was incredibly flavorful and the texture of the rice was just right.
When we filtered to our seats in the theater and watched six short food films — Volcano Bread, Sweet, Sour, Dill and Everything In Between, 1 Minute Meal: Crust Fund, How the Taste of Louisiana Was Born, 1 Minute Meal: Into My Alms, and The Cobbler and the Diamond — and each one had a food paired with the film based on the film’s subject. Volcano bread was actually a sweet rye bread baked in a sealed pot and its heat source is a geothermal hot spring in Laugarvatn Fontana Spa, Iceland. The slice of bread slathered in butter tasted like a Boston brown bread without the raisins; dense, moist, relatively sweet and deep molasses flavor. The Sweet, Sour, Dill and Everything in Between was a cute film of an ebullient third generation pickle baker of Guss’ Pickles and we had an assortment of pickles to nosh on. This continues as we go with the other featured movies. The most in depth movie about Cajun cooking was the How the Taste of Louisiana Was Born and it’s interesting to learn of its complex history of Acadians in Southern Louisiana.
There was an after party after watching the films and that means more food. The ones we liked the most was the Andouille sausage and bacon stuffed arancini by Chef Cory bahr. There was a backbone stew with rice, more Guss’ pickles, bread pudding with white chocolate, an incredible alligator stew, and Max & Mina’s espresso ice cream. The people on the film are out on the floor mingling and we had a great time (and very full by the time we headed home).