Every year, in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana, the first
full week of October is commemorated with a huge street festival. It is touted as the second biggest single
street festival next to Mardi Gras. This
bit of trivia is accredited to the late radio personality Paul Harvey, so make
of it what you will.
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| Fall Festival, bird's eye view |
It’s known as the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival…although
all the denizens of southern Indiana simply refer to it as the “Fall Festival.” Although the Fall Festival boasts its fair
share of carny-run games and rides, the real draw is the food. According to this article: http://matadornetwork.com/nights/the-worlds-most-ridiculous-food-festival/ last year’s festival contained 135 food carts culminating in over 400 menu
items.
When it was first recommended by Mr. Bob Thacker I do my
next blog on goetta I had to come clean: I’ve never had it. Now, there’s a good chance you have never had
goetta either and probably, quite frankly, never even heard of it. Probably because it is only produced and known
in the greater Cincinnati area. It’s
more or less ground meat, sometimes pork sometimes beef sometimes a mixture, mixed
with oats. Yeah, I said oats.
So people around here are often aghast when I mention such a
thing. Their jaws drop. They scratch their heads in a puzzled
manner. “Haven’t had goetta?! Well I never!” And then the obligatory recommendations: Have
it here, have it there, buy it at the grocery and cook it up yourself at
home. Etcetera, etcetera.
As luck would have it, right around the corner from the
goetta blog recommendation lay Glier’s GoettaFest, a hearty street festival centered
around celebrating the much heralded meat product. After perusing the website, I felt this would
be akin to Evansville’s Fall Festival: Games, live entertainment and, most of
all, food and drink, even if on a much smaller scale.
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| It's more crowded than it looks.... |
So it was on a hot and humid day that my wife and I trudged
down to the Newport Levee where, right on the river, Glier’s, the world’s
largest manufacturer of goetta, was holding their fest. As we climbed down the stairs towards the merriments,
the sights and smells brought with them a strong sense of nostalgia washing
over me like a wave. A crashing,
thunderous, catastrophic tsunami wave.
And there, practically swimming through the 90 degree heat and oppressive
humidity, the truth of the matter came rushing back…I fucking HATE street
festivals.
Looking down the street I saw the swarm of sweaty, unwashed
humanity, standing in long lines to buy food so enormously bad for you one
might imagine you are inviting a spur of the moment heart attack. There were those swilling overpriced beer to
wash down their overpriced food. There
was a completely mediocre live band, so loud it was near impossible to speak to
any of the nearby vendors. There were
those who brought along their broods of children, assumedly so they could ply
them with food so greasy and fattening by the time they would get home they
would be nearly catatonic, so mom and dad could watch the newest episode of
whatever completely reprehensible reality TV program is currently moderately
popular in peace and quiet. You know,
something like Swamp People or, God
forbid, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
Even when I lived in Evansville, I could never understand
the giddy excitement that descended on the town come October. Literally thousands and thousands of people,
elbow to elbow, perusing overpriced rubbish, most of it deep fried. I printed out a copy of the menu from last
year and there were FORTY-ONE items incorporating the term “fried” or “deep
fried,” including such delicacies as Snickers, Klondike Bars, Kool-Aid, cookie
dough and dandelions. This doesn’t
include items that are deep fried but just don’t say so in the
description.
I like food. I like
it a lot. I am certainly not saying I
don’t sometimes like to eat food that isn’t really all that good for me,
because I most certainly do. But when we
went to GoettaFest we spent about $40 on food which left me feeling fatigued
and borderline nauseas . $40. For goetta products either so deep fried or
so covered in cheese I couldn’t actually be 100% sure it was goetta at
all. For all I know it could have been
Soylent Green. Forty dollars should
actually be a pretty nice dinner out in a restaurant, where I don’t have to
either eat my food standing up or fight for a seat at a picnic table next to a
complete stranger. Where my eyes
wouldn’t be stinging from the sweat running down my face and the menu is well
thought out and the food comes with actual flavor instead of the sickly taste
of overheated Crisco clinging to it.
Upon first entering the festival I encountered this signage
describing goetta:
Your fork breaks the delicate crisp
and moves carefully through the creamy middle of the morning circle. Every bite sends you deeper into total
sensory engagement, and allows the mind to skip through the collection of
stories that decorate your family’s history and your own. In a moment you are at your grandma’s counter
enveloped in tales of her grandma’s kitchen.
Your heart sings.
“Holy crap,” I thought, “this stuff must be what God himself
eats for breakfast!” And I could picture
him at a table of four, with Peter Falk, Sherman Hemsley and Richard
Dawson. Oh, the ribald tales they would
share with God while drinking morning mimosas around a cornucopia spilling out
assorted fruits. Dawson would brag of
the ladies, oh all the ladies. Falk
would tell about the time he lost his glass eye to a dog, and Hemsley would ironically
proclaim about how he really had finally made it to a deluxe apartment………..in
the sky-i-i. And while they would all
chortle with laughter and pat each other reassuringly on the backs, just as the
morning feast seemed to be coming to an end and the angels were serving the
morning coffee with pieces of apple pie, God would scream up the heavens, “Let
there be more goetta!”
And so it would come to pass.
I had high expectations beforehand but this sign, this
spectacle, this promise of a semi-hallucinatory state, this raised my expectations
so high my first bite of goetta would have probably had to be accompanied by an
orgasm in order to match them. So it
was, when I had my first bite of a goetta Philly Cheesteak (a contradiction in
terms if ever there was one), it happened that my first thought was “This shit
taste like hash browns on a bun.”
This, I think, is the most depressing thing of all. For all my want to actually try and,
hopefully, enjoy goetta, none of the items there really seemed to represent the
meat. The Philly Cheesesteak was so lathered
with cheese and onion I couldn’t really taste the meat, but the consistency did
come across as hash brown-y. I finished the day with a “corn dog” because it’s a classic festival treat, but,
as far as I could tell, the goetta sausage wasn’t ever covered in any kind of
corn flour. It was simply dipped, naked, into its bath, leaving me to eat a
thin layer of congealed deep fried grease tasting just like old deep fried
grease. I’m pretty sure God wouldn’t
want his goetta sullied in such manners.
And, for that matter, neither would Peter Falk.
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| Oh, the humanity! |
On the way out of the festival we stumbled on a vending machine
filled with pre-processed pounds of goetta for three dollars. I wanted so badly to purchase meat out of a
stand-alone vending machine and I wanted, even more, with all of my heart, just
to hear the sickly thud of a pound of processed pig pieces slapping dully
against the bottom tray. But I just
couldn’t do it. On this day Glier’s had
already stolen enough of my money, if not even just a little bit of my soul.
ADDENDUM
My wife was kind enough, in her spare time, to give a handful of honest reviews of the food she sampled. So if you haven't had your fill of goetta, read on dear reader, read on...
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Goetta mac & cheese…apparently an award-winning
recipe. I started with this dish, and I
was a little disappointed with it. First,
it was a pretty big helping of mac & cheese. Second, I couldn't really
taste any of the goetta sausage in it…I basically felt like I was eating mac
& cheese with oats. As a point of
comparison, Ryan and I have recently been eating Hamburger Helper with spicy
sausage instead of hamburger for a change, and there is a cheesy rice meal that
is AWESOME with said sausage. In fact, I
would go so far as to say our variation on cheesy Mexican rice in a box would
whip the goetta mac & cheese's ass in a head-to-head taste test.
Goetta spring rolls…just tasted like spring rolls. All fried wrapper and cabbage. I had to add a little spicy mustard to mine
to give it some zing, and then all I tasted was spicy mustard. Definitely not worth the $3 for two spring
rolls that are completely basic.
I also got it in my sun-addled noggin that we needed to try
Busken bakery's Goetta Goobers, which consists of small fried lumps of
goetta-infused donut dough liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar. What the hell, Voodoo Doughnuts has a Bacon
Maple Bar… However, that is an actual donut, and these are just fried nuggets. In general, all I tasted was frying oil and
powdered sugar. Since we got them to go,
I was also stuck with the dilemma of how to store meat donuts. I can't just leave those in the breadbox, no
sir. I had to put them in the
fridge.
The goetta chili cheese chilito from Chili Rocks was really good. It was spicy, saucy and tasted just like a good chilito should. The goetta was not a distraction. And seriously, my typical gold standard chilito is one from Taco Bell. That mystery meat is probably less appetizing than goetta. So this dish gets the best in show from me out of the four goetta concoctions I tried.
