Knott's Boysenberry Festival 2020: Tasting Preview

Knott’s Berry Farm, Buena Park, CA

Spring time means food time at our local parks, and today, we’ve got a preview of the upcoming Boysenberry Festival at Knott’s Berry Farm! This year, on Knott’s 100th anniversary year, the tribute to the famous fruit that put Walter Knott’s business on the map runs Friday, March 20th through Sunday, April 19th! On Thursday, Westcoaster had the chance to preview the eats and treats that will be featured at this year’s event. It was a delicious and caloric evening of sampling some of the new and returning culinary favorites that will be offered during this year’s run, not to mention some of the souvenirs and merchandise that berry fans will love.

Lets check it all out, shall we?

Eat. Drink. Boysenberry. A good motto, if you ask us.

Merch

DIsney set the precedent for marketing seasonal offerings, including limited time souvenirs and goodies for guests to take home, and other parks have followed the template with their own seasonal events since! Knott’s is know exception, and this year’s Boysenberry Festival brings back traditional boysenberry-themed mementos.

An overview at boysenberry swag this year.

There is the usual set of boysenberry apparel, from T-shirts to sweaters and parasols. Featuring Snoopy and boysenberries and a familiar purple hue, they’re a nice keepsake for boysenberry fans. But the real features are the assortment of preserves, jams, sauces, beverages, and baked goods offered.

Sauces and jams and jellies and preserves dominate the boysenberry line-up!

New this year are premium boysenberry preserves, not to mention additional mixes for boysenberry pies and cobblers. There is also a new “B.E.A.R.” jam—featuring Boysenberry, Elderberry, Apple, and Raspberry (seewhathteydidthere), and a tasty spiced boysenberry jelly! Great for sandwiches or charcuterie, these make the perfect addition to any fan of jams and jellies. A boysenberry sasparilla also makes its debut, joining Knott’s long-standing and popular line of soft drinks. Returning favorites include a variety of boysenberry BBQ sauces and salad dressings.

And introducing new Boysenberry Sassparilla too!

Knott’s also has an answer to Disneyland’s cult Churro Toffee hit—Boysenberry English Toffee! Knott’s concoction is coated in a luscious boysenberry frosting and dusted with purple sugar, and it is diabetically addictive! Find it at the park when the festival starts!

Food

The highlight of the festival, of course, is the gourmet offerings featured at a variety of restaurants and food booths throughout the park. This year, Knott’s will once again feature specialty items at dining locations throughout the park, not to mention pop-up stands featuring snack-sized servings of a menagerie of boysenberry-topped or inspired dishes. And similar to Disney’s Sip & Savor Pass, Knott’s will have a Boysenberry Festival Tasting Card that allows guests to purchase a card that offers select dishes to be tried together at a discount rate.

The Knott’s Boysenberry Festival has also allowed the park’s culinary creators to flex their creative muscles by coming up with new and exciting dishes themed to the boysenberry. These range from dishes playing of diverse backgrounds to items that are flat out absurd. In fact, the most ridiculous sneak peek we saw was the Mega Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner-burger in One! Like something about of a viral food challenge concoction, this massive, family-sized dish features four pieces of fried chicken over a chicken pot pie over a nearly foot-diameter bun that clads an enormous cheeseburger made up of four 1-lb patties, lettuce, pickles, onion, and tomatoes. Designed to feed groups of 4-6, this monstrosity will be offered at Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant!

True food competitors should challenge this beast of a culinary creation!

Guests who want to double down on ridiculous food items can also head over to the Ghost Town Grill and get a the WOW Pastry, a giant meat pie / calzone / empanada made up of more hamburger meat, caramelized onions, Cheddar cheese and bacon, wrapped in a baked pastry and topped with two eggs, sunny side up. Knott’s started coming out with crazy culinary creations a couple of years ago, with machinations like their 2-Foot Long Hot Dog on a Boysenberry Bun, and they’re growing more and more so! We absolutely love it.

During Thursday’s Preview event, we also got to sample a series of dishes being offered this year. Highlights included:

Samosa with Boysenberry Chutney
Beef Tips with Boysenberry Mashed Potatoes
Beer Cheese Soup topped with Boysenberry drizzle and Brown Butter Croutons
Pastrami Slider on Pretzel Bun Topped with Boynseberry Mustard
Brussel Sprouts topped with a Boysenberry Balsamic and Bacon
Boysenberry Cajun Shrimp and Grits
Boysenberry Chili and Cornbread Muffin

The Samosas were wonderfully flavored and nice and cripsy!

Pastrami Sandwiches (sliders)—tender meat on softly toasted pretzel buns. Quite tasty!

The Beer Cheese soup seems like more just beer cheese than soup, but the boysenberry balsamic is delightful, and the croutons add another dimension to the dish. You can’t go wrong with brown butter anything!

These represent some of the best dishes that Knott’s has done, showcasing the steady increase in quality that the park has grown through the years. The Samosas were crispy and very flavorful, while the Brussel Sprouts were amazing, packed with rich, umami flavor, and gastropub quality! We also came up with a nice food hack in dipping the Pastrami Slider into the Beer Cheese Soup (which itself was a fiiting competitor to Disney’s famous CHOUP). Both dishes were fantastic on their own (and quite filling), but together, they were elevated to a whole new level!

Hopefully, the Brussel Sprouts will be as well roasted and crispy in the park as at our preview. They were seriously restaurant quality and one of our favorites!

The Cajun Shrimp and Grits were pretty fantastic too. The grits had a light, polenta feel to them. The flavor wasn’t too spicy, but still flavorful.

Not everything was an outright hit. We felt the new Boysenberry Chicken Mole on Cilantro Rice didn’t quite capture the deep flavor of mole quite enough. Though an admirable attempt (it’s hard to do good mole, especially in a theme park setting) that we appreciated, it just didn’t quite hit our taste buds. The Boysenberry Ceviche was also middle ground. Refreshing in taste, it also felt a little bit bland, though the fresh boysenberry was a welcome addition. Another ethnic-inspired dish, the Pork Bao Bun with Boysenberry Kimchi and Nam, was too doughy for such a small bao size, though the pork did pack a bit of a spicy tingle!

The sweet offerings that we tried were also okay. The Boysenberry Macaron was a little dense rather than delicate, and the Boysenberry Canoli was somewhat pedestrian (though admittedly, we were pretty fooded out and on sugar overload by this point). But on the drinks side of things, the Boysenberry Basil Lemonade was lovely, with a nice herbal kick. It was topped only by the Boysenberry Cucumber Lemonade, which was amazingly refreshing and a perfect amount of sweet and tart! This one will be perfect for the inevitable spring heatwave that hits SoCal every year!

Unfortunately, we can’t make this a recommendation. Maybe it was the sample we happened to get.

There are some great returning favorites too. Boysenberry Chicken Drumsticks; the Boysenberry Chili; Churro Rolled in Boysenberry Sugar; and Elote with Boysenberry Mayo, Cotija Cheese, and Boysenberry Tortilla Chips are some of the past-years hits that we’re excited to see return. Don’t forget the Boysenberry Beer and Boysenberry Cider too! They’re the perfect drinks to washing everything down after all that feasting!

Calico Cookie Kitchen

Just next to the Wilderness Dance Hall, guests can check out the Calico Cookie Kitchen. Formerly the Pony Express Outpost (and other overlays), this building has been re-furnished to represent an old fashioned kitchen, with displays of some lovely tarts and cakes and pies that would be right at home back in the days of Calico! It’s a cute exhibit that is worth a quick stop during one’s visit.

Cookie kitchens are the best kitchens, right?

The cakes and tarts look great! But we don’t recommend eating these particular ones…

That wraps up our quick look at this this year’s Boysenberry Festival! With so many options to sample, it’s definitely worth a trip or two to check out. Knott’s has really done a fantastic job growing this humble celebration into a marquee annual tradition that guests and fans look forward to each year, and the festival is a fantastic complement (or alternative) to the Food & Wine Festival at Disney California Adventure.

We’ll be back in a couple of weekends when the festival starts for more coverage. But mark your calendars for March 20 - April 19. It’s going to be a berry good month of boysen goodness!