Food
Guten essen-good eatin'!
There's nowhere else on earth you can find as many Pennsylvania Dutch delicacies than the Kutztown Folk Festival!
Scrumptious & Plentiful
It's Pennsylvania Dutch tradition that meals should be delicious and feed lots of friends and family. The Kutztown Folk Festival is a food lover’s dream and a chance to experience all the scrumptious local treats. Tasty selections abound, with items ranging from ice cream to family-style dinners.
Our Country Kitchen where you can experience a full course Pennsylvania Dutch family-style meal cooked right in front of your eyes! This ticketed experience includes the 7 sweets and 7 sours.
Our NEW Fresh Fest Market offering healthier food offerings, local craft beers, specially crafted cocktails with local ingredients.
Festival favorites including local sausage, pot pie, corn fritters, funnel cake, apple dumplings and shoo-fly pie.
GF - Gluten free options available
V - Vegan options available
“So much fun!!! Lots of food and drinks. Tons of vendors and lots of cool stuff to look at. Definately recommend 8 Oaks Distillery...amazing...the BBQ spot is a must try, the brisket is incredible.”
- Festival Attendee
4th Day Homemade Ice Cream l GF
B & C Quick Bites LLC / Kids Korner
Battle Ground Coffee
Bread Oven
Crepes & Cones
Das Pickle Haus
Dietrich's Meats and Country Store
Esser Corn on the Cob
Esser's Apples
Honey Lane Winery l GF
Island Expressions / XPlorer Spirits
Kilimanjaro Distillery / XPlorer Spirits
Kutz Mill Orchards
Kutztown Fire Company - Heart and Hearth
Kutztown Music Assoc. (KASMA) l GF, V
Merry Poppins Kettle Corn l V
Orange Drinka
Porky's Last Stand Smokehouse and BBQ
Pretzel Revolution
PT Hut, LLC
Pure Wild Tea l GF, V
Rural City Beer Co. l GF
Sharadin's Bakery
Soda Wagon
Southern Specialties l GF, V
St John's UCC Strawberry Festival l GF, V
Tre wood fired l Vegetarian options
Under the Reign Lemonade
Waffle & Ice Cream
Wild Bill's Craft Beverage Co.
Your Chocolate Guys l GF, V
Fresh Fest Market at the Grove
Kutztown Produce Shack
Welcome to our Fresh Fest Market at The Grove, located right at the Kutztown Folk festival grounds. This new healthier eating option will offer fresh flavors, locally produced food, local craft beers and spirits. You will know you and your family are eating quality, natural foods-and best of all-you don’t have to do the cooking!
In addition to the new fresh foods and drink offerings this year, we will have a stage with demonstrations, presentations, and musical entertainment. This is a great way for kids to have fun and learn where their food comes from at the same time!
Country Kitchen Lunch Experience
The “Country Kitchen” presentation is an authentic Pennsylvania Dutch meal complete with “seven sweets and seven sours” tradition, all cooked on a 1920’s era wood stove. Attendees will be able to partake in a meal cooked in the country kitchen during a 45-minute historical cooking presentation and meal limited to just eight guests per day.
Visitors will step back in time as they are led by Kutztown’s own Esser family, Joyce and her son Matt, as well as area historian Terry Berger, on a cooking demonstration that will begin with an explanation and display of the key features of a 100-year-old mock kitchen. Cooking tools, utensils, and vintage storage containers are just a few of the working artifacts on display and in use. The “center-piece” cooking stove will be in full operation as the day’s meal is prepared on it.
This up-close and personalized presentation will be followed by a multi-course sit-down family style meal in the country kitchen where visitors will enjoy the traditional PA Dutch foods prepared in the kitchen.
Limited to just eight guests at two different seatings, the daily menu will vary among numerous traditional delicacies such as pork roast, baked ham, baked chicken, schnitz and knepp, ham and string beans, chicken pot pie, dumplings, lettuce with hot bacon dressing, pepper cabbage, cottage cheese and apple butter, red beat eggs, chow-chow (pickled vegetables), fresh baked bread, fruit pies, apple cobbler, rice pudding, and mint tea just to name a few. Hungry, this traditional PA Dutch meal is sure to be an experience that will not be forgotten!
The festival’s country kitchen has been a staple at the region’s most unique summer festival for decades, offering visitors a glimpse into the tradition of how Pennsylvania Dutch meals were prepared with ornate cast iron, wood burning, stoves. Gaining in popularity and becoming more affordable, these four plate top stoves, complete with an oven and warming space were the “modern luxury” of the time in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
Ox Roast
On five select days of the Festival’s annual summertime nine day run, Fest-goers will be able to witness the awesome site of an 800 pound Black Angus steer being slow roasted on a specially designed, open-air, rotisserie like custom-built roaster.
At the stroke of mid-night, festival food specialist Vince Cocca, area folklife historian Harold Schaeffer, and an additional crew of five will load the magnificent animal onto the aforementioned roaster.
Needing 10 to 12 hours of roasting time, Schaeffer periodically rotates the steer, while basting it with a juicy blend of spices and herbs.
By 11 am, 2 hours after the festival gates open, Schaeffer will methodically begin carving off the finished meat just in time for the hungry lunchtime crowds. The succulent roasted meat is then piled high on large round rolls and served throughout the day. The famous Ox Roast sandwich is available all 9 days of the Festival.
The Ox Roast presentation pays homage to days gone by when the oxen, a specially trained agricultural working steer, was very much revered. When the oxen reached the end of its life, it became the center point of a wonderful celebration and feast for many working farm families.
In 2018 with the help of Vince Cocca, his son Chris, and Art Hertzog’s son Bill, a plan was laid out to rebuild, and bring the Ox Roast presentation back to the Festival. Fabrication and planning continued into early 2019 as a much more efficient custom built heating system was acquired from Texas. Also joining the team at this time was local fabricator Johnny Kelschner and Southeastern Pennsylvania community oriented fuel supplier, Suburban Propane.
Literally, under the cover of darkness on the eve of the Festival’s 2019 opening, the Festival’s set-up crew put the final touches on the remarkable rebuild. The first “trial run” of the Festival’s new Ox Roast was completed on opening day. As they say, “the rest is history,” once again!
Dietrich's Fresh Meats and Treats
An old-fashioned farmers market is part of the landscape in Pennsylvania Dutch country. And, the best of these markets are those that have been family-owned and operated for generations. They know everything about good food!
So, meet Verna Dietrich and her children and grandchildren. Three generations of the Dietrich family help out at the Kutztown Festival, providing the very finest meats, baked goods, and other delectable foods. In fact, Festival visitors year after year make a point of stopping by Dietrich’s Festival Farmers Market.
The original Dietrich’s Meats & Country Store, located just minutes from Kutztown in Krumsville, PA, has been featured in newspaper and magazine articles, and on radio and television. It’s as much a treat to stop by and visit with Verna at the Festival or in Krumsville as it is to sample the goodies she coaxes you to “try before you buy”.
Verna and her family follow the tried and true Pennsylvania Dutch traditions. All of the meats in Dietrich’s Market are fresh grown on their own farms by Verna’s sons. Their prized smoked meats are never chemically treated. They are prepared just as Verna or you would want them to be for your family’s enjoyment.
Baked goods prepared according to generations-old Pennsylvania Dutch recipes are another reason for stopping at Dietrich’s Market. Debbie Dietrich is well known for her famous shoofly pie (both traditional and chocolate) and for strawberry rhubarb pie, lemon sponge pie, funny cake, and funeral pie. All of these mouth-watering treats are baked daily and are absolutely irresistible.
Verna and her family will be glad to see you at Dietrich’s Festival Family Market, so stop by and say hello!
The Festival Bake Oven
Kutztown Folk Festival visitors have their senses on overdrive as the aroma of fresh baked bread fills the air. The festival's bake oven offers tempting hearth-baked goods while giving spectators a look back in time at traditional outdoor baking techniques.
Classic 1800s Southeastern Pennsylvania Architecture
With its limestone foundation, brick hearth, and red clay tile roof, our bake oven is a classic example of early 1800s Southeastern Pennsylvania architecture. Early farmsteads were almost always laid out with a separate standalone bake oven or summer kitchen that would house a large walk-in fireplace complete with a smaller-sized baking area within.
Early each morning, bake oven tender Gary Hertzog builds his first of many large wood fires directly on the oven's hearth (baking area). Baking on the principles of "retained heat," Gary will "knock down" or clear out all the remaining ash and embers from the hearth area once the oven has reached the desired temperature.
Bake After Tasty Bake
Items requiring the highest amount of heat such as our famous high-top round bread loaves are loaded and baked first. When the bread is finished baking and removed from the oven, items requiring less heat such as pies or our giant iced cinnamon buns are loaded into the oven and baked on the heat from the original fire.
Gary will do up to six "fires" in one day, allowing for as many as eight to twelve separate "bakes" on any given day. Doing this many bakes in an oven that can hold up to 60 loaves of bread certainly allows for many a festival visitor to take home a tasty traditional treat!
