For the eighth time, the Zaubes Wild Culinary Festival will gather visitors on 7 September 2024 to celebrate the knowledge of nature’s bounty passed down through generations with chefs and hostesses, hunters and fishermen, nature connoisseurs and artisans. This year’s theme is “Mushroom Time”. It has been chosen in honour of the inclusion of the mushroom tradition in the National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The gathering and use of mushrooms is a long-established tradition in Latvia, which is still alive today. The main use of mushrooms is for human consumption. Almost every family has its own recipe for mushroom sauce, soup or mushroom chops. They can be salted, pickled, pickled, dried, boiled and baked. It is an essential part of our culinary heritage.
This year’s festival programme, organised together with the Latvian Mycological Society, will offer a diverse world of mushroom knowledge – an exhibition “Edible and inedible mushrooms”, cooking masterclasses and demonstrations, mushroom workshops, environmental education activities, competitions and lectures. You can learn not only about the nutritional and medicinal uses of mushrooms, but also about creative uses in crafts and households, and about the importance of mushrooms in nature.
As in other years, the festival programme will be complemented by traditional wild seafood cooking demonstrations by Zaubes hunters and fishermen, new meetings with Vidzeme craftsmen in creative workshops, musical interludes and a crafts and home producers’ market.