Over the past few years, the aromas from the cooking tent near the main pavilion have enticed more and more visitors to the Mudgee Small Farm Field Days to discover how to break down a sheep carcass, cook up a lamb feast, and make their own brine.
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On Friday afternoon, many of the field days visitors got out of the rain and listened to chef and Hello Lovelies creator Bec Sutton, Spencer Cocoa chocolatier Luke Spencer, and Little Big Dairy Company’s Erika Chesworth explain why single origin products are some of the best tasting products available.
“Single origin means exactly that,” chef Bec Sutton said.
“Producers either raise or grow the products themselves or they buy them off a producer directly to create their product.”
As well as being a well known chef in the Mudgee region, Ms Sutton is one of the brains behind Hello Lovelies cordial.
Hello Lovelies is hand-made in Mudgee from products Ms Sutton and her partner buy directly from local growers.
'It’s really a privilege that people trust us to produce a product that they drink and eat so we try to do it to the highest contemporary standards possible.'
“The fruit all comes from the Mudgee region, and from particular growers,” Ms Sutton said.
“My pomegranates come from a farm just down the road, my oranges are from Gooree Park.
“All of my ingredients are bought from the farm and I know the producers, the way that they operate, and the quality of the product that I’m getting.”
Erika Chesworth from Little Big Dairy Company in Dubbo said everything from birthing the calves to raising and milking the cows and bottling and packaging the milk occurred on her family’s dairy farm.
“Three years ago we decided we could stand being pushed around by the major processors and decided to build a factory of own and become a single origin dairy as a way of differentiating our eight million litres of milk from everyone else’s,” Mrs Chesworth said.
Little Big Dairy Company is proud that its milk is bottled, packaged, and on the truck on its way to the store within hours of milking, unlike some bigger competitors who can take at least 24 hours to get milk from the farm to the processing plant.
“We’re very proud to be a single source company and of the ethics that come with that branding,” Mrs Chesworth said.
“It’s really a privilege that people trust us to produce a product that they drink and eat so we try to do it to the highest contemporary standards possible.”
Mudgee chocolate maker Luke Spencer uses only beans from three plantations in Vanuatu, a milk powder from Tasmania, and cane sugar from Bundaberg in Queensland.
“There are three important things that are critical to what we do at Spencer Cocoa,” Mr Spencer said.
“The first thing is the people that are involved, from the plantation to packaging here in Mudgee,.
The second is the ingredients, and the third is the way we manufacture the product.”
Mr Spencer said single origin products were often a better if the ingredients were all sourced from one area.
“The big thing for us is that the flavour from the products we make are representative of the ingredients we choose and with a single source for our beans from Vanuatu, we can pretty much guarantee that,” he said.
Visitors were invited to compared the regionally made product against a mass processed competitor to taste the difference single origin makes.
Ms Sutton said as well as nearly always providing a superior taste to a mass produced product that could use ingredients from twenty different locations, single origin production also meant buying directly from a farmer – and cutting out the middle men who often take a large cut of the profit.
