Hiawassee Egg Fest - Beautiful mountain setting and great food

If you have not been to this Egg Fest in the GA mountains - you are missing out.  Ample parking, a tree-lined thoroughfare, buildings for the vendors, real bathrooms, and Lake Hiawasee in the background. We packed the Egg in the car and put the mobile cart on the back and headed 2 hours North to the mountains.

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The site was absolutely gorgeous and we did most of the setup on Friday night before the fantastic covered dish cook's dinner.  Thank you to all of the cooks who brought their "A-game" to the covered dish.  (If you are going to attend a covered dish dinner - make sure there are a bunch of Eggers there!  Wow)

Saturday morning we started setting up for Pizza production.   We had 40 dough balls on deck and plenty of ingredients to make a variety of different pizzas.

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We cranked up the egg about 8:45 thinking that with a 9:00 gate opening, we would have "tasters" at about 9:30.  We were wrong!  People showed up at 9:02 and were excited to start tasting food.

This photo was taken at about 11:00. See the line in the background?  We had great folks coming by all day long.  There were many questions about how to handle dough and transfer it to the pizza stone.  We tried to do as many demos as possible.  I even had a challenger watching my every move to see if one would stick to the peel.  I had one stick to the peel late in the day - we got a little more cornmeal on that edge and it slid right in.

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My good friend Mark was a substitute pizza chef for this event.  He actually volunteered for this. For those who watched and tasted, Mark had only made 4 or 5 pizzas before this event.  I think you will agree he did a great job.

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With the help of both of our daughters we cranked out and served pizzas.  At about 12:30 it was time to add charcoal.   So our first load of charcoal lasted nearly 4 hours.  This is a new record for the Pizza-Porta cooling crew!  We reloaded and after a 10 minute warm up we were cooking again.  We realized that we had already cooked 28 pizzas!  Only 12 left for an event that lasts until 3:00!

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We were so busy that we didn't take very good photos of our creations.  This Margherita was near the end of the day.  We slowed our pace a bit and ventured out to taste some of the fantastic dishes from our Egg neighbors.  Shout out to elk sausage, stuffed peppers, and some sort of pork extravaganza on a tooth pick.

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This is our last pizza at about 2:15.    

We got to meet some legendary eggers and some who were taking the plunge by buying an Egg at the festival.  Welcome to the family!  Thank you to all the organizers.  A special thank you to Crane Creek Vineyards for agreeing to share booth space.  See you next year!

Thank you for reading.

Cortlandt

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Post trip update:

While unpacking, I found the leftover charcoal from the entire day of cooking pizza - we used 1/2 bag for 40 pizzas..