This year’s Falmouth Oyster Festival launched this morning with a cookery demonstration from 2009 MasterChef winner Mat Follas.

The chef, who now runs his own restaurant The Wild Garlic in Dorset, put some of the skills he honed in the TV cooking contest to create a dish of steak and oyster pie using Pennycomequick, stout from Truro-based Skinner’s Brewery. The stout is brewed especially for the festival each year and remains on sale for a month afterwards.

Mat was helped in the cooking by Howard Sellers, sous chef at The Cove restaurant at Maenporth.

Ahead of the cookery demonstration on the main stage in a marquee on Event’s Square, Mike Rangecroft of joint event organisers Falmouth Festivals Ltd, with Visit Cornwall, welcomed He said: “We have had lots of support and we really do need that support to make the event a success.”

The annual festival, now in its thirteenth year, celebrates the start of the oyster-dredging season.

Chefs from some of the best of Falmouth’s hotels and restaurants will give demonstrations over the course of the three-day festival, including a Hot Chefs Challenge between Arty Williams of The Cove and Nick Williams of the Headland Hotel in Newquay.

Tomorrow afternoon a parade of schoolchildren will make its way from The Moor through the town, leaving at 3.15pm. They will be dressed to a nautical theme and carry paper sculptures.

Other highlights including an oyster shucking competition between 3pm and 4pm on Saturday and the Oyster Ball later that evening, from 7pm, at St Michael’s Hotel – the festival’s main sponsors.

For full coverage of the whole festival, including a picture special, see next week’s Packet.

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