A living food story
Our culinary heritage is the backbone of the modern Barossa community, and visitors to the Barossa can reach out and experience this heritage in so many ways.
This is a region where food traditions thrive as part of everyday life, and where innovative new food businesses, both large and small, are inspired to create new Barossa food.
The Barossa food story is a multi-faceted, continually evolving ode to seasonality and regionality. It tells of fruit ripened to perfection and vegetables bursting with real flavour. Of milk and cheese that taste of goodness and of poultry, pork and lamb that are fed well and nurtured with kindness. Of artisan food prepared with care and passion. And of time-honoured recipes passed down through seven generations.
It is a story that weaves tradition and innovation into an edible, timeless tapestry.
The Barossa's food culture continues to thrive, and we invite you to experience its richness and diversity. Built on resilience and necessity, today it offers a warm welcome to all and the opportunity to find your own place in our food story.
A humble beginning
Although the earliest European settlers were English with large holdings in the Barossa Ranges, it was German-speaking settlers, devout Lutherans, who had the strongest impact on the flavours of Barossa food. They arrived with only a few meagre possessions but they carried a wealth of culinary traditions in their baggage.
Drawing on farming practices developed by their forebears, they planted orchards, vegetable gardens and vineyards, and cleared grazing paddocks, for their livestock. They built wood ovens to bake bread, smokehouses and cellars to preserve their produce and adapted recipes from their homeland to suit their new environment.
Driven by the need to preserve the bounty of the land and a stoic belief in the waste not, want not principle, they smoked meats and dried fruit, fermented and pickled vegetables, made cheese and fermented grapes to make wine. They celebrated the turning of the seasons and gave thanks in the spired Lutheran churches that still dot the Barossa landscape. Treasured family recipes, handed down from generation to generation, tell this story again and again and preserve a foundational food imperative – nothing is wasted at Barossa tables.
Barossa townships were established early; butchers opened their doors and the aroma of their smokehouses full of ham, bacon and mettwurst drew customers. Bakeries offered traditional Streuselkuchen, honey biscuits and freshly baked bread and the culinary threads were deftly passed from farmhouse kitchens to village butchers and bakers. Inevitably supermarkets made their appearance but even they were, and still are, imbued with Barossa’s traditional flavours.
The custom of socialising with family and friends at the dining table, on food grown, prepared and served at home in a generous spirit, is deeply rooted in Barossa’s culture. Accordingly, it was no accident that the Barossa Cookery Book, thought to be the first regional cookbook in Australia, was chosen to raise funds for the war effort in 1917. It is still in print today. So deep-seated was the practice of home entertaining that the first restaurants in the region didn’t open their doors until the 1970s.