What's Inside the Gourmet Emporium Hamper, Item by Item

The Gourmet Emporium Hamper holds seventeen things to eat and drink: nine savoury, seven sweet, and one 400ml bottle of French syrup. No wine, no beer, no spirit, which is the point. It sits at the top of our alcohol-free range, and it is built to be picked at by a room rather than opened by one person.

Laid out on a bench it is four crackers, three jars, two bowls to hand round, seven sweet things and a bottle. Here is what each of them is for.

Four crackers, three jars, two bowls: the savoury nine

Four of the seventeen are, broadly, crackers, which reads as padding until you put them side by side. They are four different builds. The mini artisan crackers with sea salt are the small, light ones, and the only genuinely neutral cracker in the box: a soft cheese on one of these still tastes of itself. The artisan flatbread crackers with beetroot, 130g, are the wide, rigid ones, and they take a heaped spoonful of chutney without folding in half. The native artisan crackers are baked with native wattleseed and sweet fig and made for fine cheese, so keep those back for a sharp cheddar. The artisan pita box, olive oil and sea salt, is thick and crunchy rather than fine, and it is the one people eat plain, out of the box, while the board is still being built.

Three jars cover what a cheese board actually wants: something salty, something roasted, something sweet. The Kangaroo Island Mediterranean olives are not one olive. The jar is a seasonal mix, so the bowl comes out with more than one colour and more than one size in it, and it goes out brine and all. The TRCC 'G For George' tapenade is the red one: roasted capsicum, no black olive anywhere in it, sweeter and softer than the word tapenade tends to promise. The TRCC Indian Light Infantry fruit chutney, 110g, is apricots, prunes, raisins, apples and dates cooked down with spices, and it is the jar that outlives the box, going onto cheddar and cold roast chicken well into January.

The last two savoury items are for the person who walks past the board wanting one handful of something. Hunter's Gourmet potato chips in black truffle come in the 40g canister, which is about right for the ten minutes before anyone has decided to sit down. Mr Filbert's Italian black truffle mixed nuts sit beside them, the same truffle note in a form you can eat standing up. Having two black truffle items in a box of seventeen is not an accident, and they are the two that go first.

The seven sweet things, and where each one belongs

Seven items make up the sweet half, and they are seven textures rather than seven versions of chocolate.

Scottie Dog Shortbread Co. fingers are the plain butter biscuit in a box full of chocolate, and the packet that gets opened before anyone has thought about dessert. Kangaroo Island Produce Co honey popcorn carries the island's own Ligurian bee honey, and it is the first of the seven to vanish. The soft one is TCE Belgian chocolate truffles, cocoa dusted. TCE milk chocolate roasted almonds are whole almonds under milk chocolate, and they are the coffee table item rather than the cheese board one. TCE caramelised cashew brittle breaks rather than bends, roasted cashews set in caramel thin enough to crack under a spoon. Against that, the buttermilk caramel sea salt fudge gives way under a thumb, and the salt in it keeps the caramel from turning sickly. The VPC fruit pyramid is the one that refuses to pick a side, a pressed block of fig and almond dense enough to cut, and it belongs on the cheese board rather than the dessert plate.

One December note. The chocolate is the only part of this box with an opinion about temperature, so the truffles and the milk chocolate almonds want the coolest cupboard in the house from the day the parcel lands. The other five are happy wherever you put them.

The one bottle, and why an alcohol-free box needs it

The only thing in the hamper you do not eat is a 400ml bottle of Bacanha Sirop Brut de Yuzu. Yuzu is a citrus from Asia and the syrup is a concentrate of it, tangy and fruity, with a lemony scent that belongs to the fruit and not to a lemon. Two teaspoons in a tall glass of soda water is a drink, not a consolation, and the same two teaspoons go into a mocktail or over ice cream.

That matters more than it sounds. An alcohol-free box usually falls down in the same place: the person not drinking is handed something to eat while everyone else is handed a glass. A bottle they can make something out of closes that gap, and 400ml closes it more than once.

The full seventeen, item by item

Every line below is on the pack list for this hamper, in the size it comes in.

The pack list does not stop at seventeen. Five more lines follow the food: the French blue hamper box finished with gold ribbon, the insulated shipper carton it travels inside, a free personalised gift card, free standard delivery Australia-wide, and track and trace on the parcel. Very infrequently a single component is out of stock, and when that happens we substitute a product of equal or higher value, in most cases from the same category, most often a different flavour or variety of the same thing.

What people ask before they send one

How many items are in the Gourmet Emporium Hamper?

Seventeen things to eat and drink: nine savoury, seven sweet and one 400ml bottle of yuzu syrup. The five lines that follow them on the pack list are the box, the shipper carton, the gift card, the delivery and the tracking, not food.

How should the Gourmet Emporium Hamper be stored?

Store the unopened box somewhere cool and dry and everything in it keeps. Nothing here needs a fridge before it is opened, which is what makes the box postable in an Australian December. Once it is open, the three jars and the bottle go in the fridge: the olives, the tapenade, the chutney and the yuzu syrup. The chocolate is happiest in the coolest cupboard in the house from the day it arrives.

Who is the Gourmet Emporium Hamper for?

A household of more than one person: a family opening it together, an office kitchen, a couple who host. Roughly half the box is handed round rather than plated, so it stretches further than seventeen items sounds. It also suits every recipient you cannot send a bottle of wine to, and if that recipient is in another state, we have written separately about sending a Christmas hamper interstate.

If it is more box than the occasion needs, the rest of our alcohol-free hampers step down from it, and the wider Christmas hampers range sits alongside. For where a box this size lands against everything else on the shelf, we have set out what a Christmas hamper costs in Australia.

The Gourmet Emporium Hamper is built by our packing team rather than a machine, and standard delivery is free Australia-wide on this one. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post.