Saturday, November 7, 2015

Scenes from the 2015 Arkansas Cornbread Festival.

The fifth Arkansas Cornbread Festival is (as of this writing) still underway on South Main Street in Little Rock.  The annual to-do created by Anita Davis and hosted around the Bernice Garden brings hundreds of cornbread lovers to this booming new area each year to celebrate a Southern staple.

This year, instead of having both professionals and amateurs compete, the professional restaurant teams are providing free samples from their restaurants and allowing the amateurs to shine.  The prizes?  $1,200 for Best of Show, $750 for Best Traditional and Best Non-Traditional, and $500 for Best Side Dish,  The stakes are high and the cornbread is tasty.

It's good to see South Main Street this packed with food lovers.

Local community members are also sharing their arts, crafts and talents, with musical acts and classes and lots of information to take home.

Here are some of the many entries for this year's event... can you figure out which one belongs to whom?

Entries are given out in separate containers.  This competitor went with ketchup cups.

This is what it looked like before being dished up.

Some competitors were very inventive, such as this one who added Goldfish Crackers for flavor.

Some entries were almost golden orange.

Others were a light yellow.

There were fried entries, such as this hush puppy.

There were jalapenos in some of the cornbread samples.

And some of the cornbreads were served with sauce, beans or salsa.

You could find just about any sort of cornbread on Main Street.

Even deep fried versions on a stick.

And all along, there were great ways these competitors made their cornbread original and unique.

No two were alike.

But they were all pretty good.


And hey, photo ops!

The cornbread may be about gone, but there's still music until 4 p.m.

2 comments:

  1. Looks like fun. Wish I had been in town to go, but after it's all said and done, my favorite would probably be my mother's old fashion cornbread. Or some of those fried ones.

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  2. I never made it to the Cornbread Festival when I was living in the area. Looks like I missed out on a good time!

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