Boysenberries, Food and Wine

OC theme park food festivals are underway this spring. 

Knott’s Berry Farm was just a farm and roadside restaurant for hungry travelers between L.A. and San Diego when Betty Boysen first appeared. 

Her cheery purple smile welcomed folks to stop and try the unique treats Cordelia Knott was making with their unique crop, the boysenberry. Eighty years later, the berry is still here and Betty’s making a comeback. 

“She’s going to be one of the official characters of the Boysenberry Festival,” says Karl Busche, merchandise manager for Knott’s, who’s putting her on various items for the 10th anniversary of the festival. “She started in 1945 as a roadside sign out on Beach Boulevard,” and then disappeared for decades. Busche recently rediscovered her in an old photo and made a decision. “This is our history. But we said, ‘Wait a minute, what is this?’ Nobody knows who created the sign. Back in the ‘40s, Mr. Knott had so many people on payroll, so who knows? We don’t know the backstory and that’s the weird thing. But Betty was out there, now she’s a piece of it. We’ve leaned heavy into Betty Boysen.”

The annual spring foodie fest celebrating the berry runs March 28 through April 27 and features dozens of new items this year, and plenty of popular comfort food items returning. 

“Our theme is just to take the boysenberry and push it as far as we can,” says Director of Food and Beverage Wilf Seymour. “We’ve got some items here you wouldn’t necessarily think would go with boysenberry, but they actually go quite well.”

A few miles down the 5 Freeway, Disneyland Resort is cooking up their own annual foodie event, the Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival, from Feb. 28 through April 21. The mix of new and returning items includes the sirloin Gruyére mac-and-cheese, café de olla tres leches cake, the Mickey-shaped macaron and the esquites-loaded chips. 

“Food & Wine for our chefs is sort of like our Super Bowl,” says Chef Duke Brown. “We get together. We get the best ingredients, bring the team together and showcase our stories. Our food. Our heritage. And of course, all the wonderful cuisine here in Southern California.”

And like Walt Disney once said about his park, the Food & Wine Festival will never be finished as well. The chefs haven’t settled for a fixed menu of predictable theme park fare. Instead, they continue to experiment with various styles and flavors. 

“It is one of those things where you try to find things that are new and exciting,” Brown says. “As a chef, I have a lot of insight on food, but to learn new things, I have to go and talk to people and try their food. One thing that’s taught me a lot is different cultures. Learning those techniques, learning those foods, also learning about those cultures and the history behind them just inspires you to see how you can, not only represent it in a traditional and cultural way, but how we can vary it and make it our own. I walk around and talk to everybody and you’d be surprised how many people have suggestions. It’s a learning experience every single day for us.”

Both Knott’s and California Adventure offer family budget-friendly ways to sample as many of the event foods as possible via the Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival Sip and Savor Pass for $32-$63, and Knott’s Boysenberry Festival Tasting Card for $55. 

Chef Luis Madrigal agrees with Brown. 

“There is no one person that says, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ It’s the combination of the work of different chefs and different partnerships throughout the years. It’s just us putting ingredients together and what tastes good and what we really enjoy eating,” Madrigal says. “We love to see reviews online. We love to see what our guests have to say about the food. And that’s how we determine what to hold on to for a little longer.”

Madrigal says they’ve brought in about 80 percent in new items. But some are also new twists on old favorites. 

 “This year, we decided to go a little wild and see how it goes. There are some items that are combinations of previous items, like the sirloin Gruyére mac-and-cheese [with black garlic chimichurri and garlic butter crunch]. Last year, we had the carbonara mac-and-cheese and we had the black garlic sirloin chimichurri with mashed potatoes. All we did was combine the meat with the mac-and-cheese into one dish, a combination of two popular items,” Madrigal says. “Our Frito chili pie is a chili made with Impossible meat, topped with a little bit of cheese sauce, onion, tomatoes, some sour cream and some sliced jalapeno. It lends itself for visitors on the go. It’s like a shaker salad, but this is in a little Frito’s bag. The chips are great themselves, but why not add some topping to them?”

Brown also has his personal faves. “There are a couple of things that are really special to me. Over at Paradise Garden Grill, we have pescado zarandeado [grilled whole fish]. It’s nice and big. It’s filleted nice and open so you can get all the wonderful goodness from inside. Over at Sonoma, we have burrata toast [toasted sourdough, onion jam, burrata, tomatoes, arugula and balsamic glaze]. Me, I love burrata toast. Everybody try this one. It’s a light, refreshing bite.”

At Knott’s, even Seymour can still be surprised at what they come up with. “Our new items are always crazy, like our funnel cake. We have an amazing pastry shop here that makes the tres leches, so why can’t we do this as a funnel cake? We’ve got traditional items we bring back year after year, like the fun bun, but we’ve never done the stuffed croissant before, or the boysenberry cinnamon bun. We go back in history a long way for some things. The farm here, they grew rhubarb. So we brought that back and did some old crazy stuff like ambrosia salad. My grandmother loved making ambrosia salad. And you think, ‘Nobody makes that anymore, why can’t we make it?’ So, boysenberry in the ambrosia is kind of fun to play with.”

But despite all the experimenting, some things are untouchable. 

“The chicken wings have been here almost every year. We skipped one year and everybody yelled at us,” says Seymour. “The meatball is the next item. Elote came the second year as well. Those three items have been around and can never leave.”

And nothing tops Mrs. Knott’s own work. 
“We’ve stayed only to her recipes,” Busche says about the boysenberry jams, syrups and certain other boysenberry standards. “We went back to the original. You have to be a little creative once you start mixing things, but on the original preserves we stay with her. That’s it. That’s kind of the rule, you don’t change it. The boysenberry pie is a line in the sand. The way the chicken tastes. That’s a line in the sand. … I never thought you could do this much with boysenberry

By Shawn Price