photographer FIONA STOCKER

In 2014, I set up a stall selling farm produce at a tomato festival in Selbourne, and it was a lovely day out in the paddocks for gardening enthusiasts. When the ABC gardening guru Tino Carnevale bought a pork sausage from us, it was a starry moment.

Since then, Annette and Nevil Reed have built the Tasmanian Tomato and Garlic Festival into an institution, with 170 types of heirloom tomatoes and a couple of thousand punters now featured. The people who flock here include top chefs such as Michelin-starred Analiese Gregory, formerly of Hobart’s famed Franklin restaurant. She once persuaded a friend to drive her from the Huon Valley to Tomato and Garlic Festival, spent the day sipping mead and saw a festival with all the chutzpah of the Great British Bake-Off “but with less Noel Fielding” (for those ungrounded in British television, Fielding is the strangely attractive, and gothic, host of the show).

In 2024, Analiese Gregory is back as guest chef and is making a salad, Annette’s tomato and peaches with honey vinegar and burrata curds, from her cookery book. “Annette” is Annette Reed, and the recipe was inspired by the tomatoes from this very farm.

In front of a rapt audience and with precision belying the outdoor situation, Gregory brings milk up to temperature, adds lemon juice and rennet and turns it into curd cheese. There’s a lot of leftover whey and this leads to a conversation with the audience about potential uses: besides being a traditional food for pigs, it’s good for compost and septic tanks, someone says.

This leads on to the topic of waste. When Gregory worked in Michelin-starred restaurants, she saw a lot of waste, she says, such as perfect circles cut from foie gras and the rest discarded. While she might have been overawed at the time, nowadays she favours less wasteful habits and wants to know where her ingredients come from. There are loud murmurs of agreement from across the marquee.

Gregory brings together the freshly made curds, Reed farm tomatoes and peaches from her own garden, turning the mix over with her hands in that careful way chefs have, and adding fresh fennel, also from her garden.

It is, she says, “a Tasmanian version of an Italian caprese, which can be life changing and transformative”.

Audience members queue reverently for a transformative tasting plate, and I miss out, being too busy photographing it.

I have better luck with the festival’s other guest chef, the no-less starry Bjoern Schorpp, lately of Broome and the rest of the world and now chef at Launceston’s new eatery Tatler Lane.

Schorpp goes more cheffy with a fennel-crusted tuna crudo with tomato relish and radish. He quickly establishes a line of banter with the audience, especially the mature ladies in the front row who are having a great time long before the crudo hits the plate. There’s a lengthy discussion about what constitutes a “normal” radish: long or round? The woman in front of me indulges in a loud rhapsody about “old-fashioned” radishes. “You see how 20 years of cooking have taught me nothing,” says Schorpp. “I only know modern radishes.”

There are plenty of take-home Michelin chef tips, such as not seasoning your tomato relish until it has reduced, lest it gets too salty. He shares with us the gizmo bought in Japan for producing julienne vegetables – long, narrow strips – and when his fluent German-accented English stumbles for a moment over “crumbing or crumping”, he hopes it won’t turn up in the citizenship test.

Skillfully navigating the banter and one tiger-face-painted toddler who runs screaming through the marquee, Schorpp effortlessly brings together and plates up a sophisticated dish. Elbowing my way through the pack, I get a tasting plate this time. The light, silken texture of the spicy crumbed tuna is offset by a deliberate kick from those julienned radishes and a note of sweetness from a carefully dressed froth of micro-greens, the rich tomato relish bringing everything together.

We end our day with a ramble through the tomato sheds, admiring and purchasing a selection of the jewel-like heritage tomatoes from cardboard selection boxes.

It has been good to bookend my experience of the festival, this being the last time the Reed family will run it. Over 10 years, Annette and Nevil Reed have created cultural heritage here which echoes the heritage value of their beautiful crop. It speaks of the fecundity of the island and the full-heartedness of its people. No wonder we have enjoyed it.

Fiona Stocker is a writer based in the Tamar Valley. She has published the books A Place in the Stockyard (2016) and Apple Island Wife (2018). For more information, see fionastockerwriter.com.