In fact, fried green beans have distinguished themselves by making their way from the fairgrounds to white tablecloth restaurants. Not all fried foods are gluttonous calorie bombs like deep-fried Oreos or deep-fried bacon. “You’ve got the batter on the outside and it fries and the butter inside melts.”Īn indulgent way to get your five a day. “It’s like an inside-outside pancake,” Geary explains. “So they’re small, almost like a slider.”Įverything is bigger in Texas and that includes high-falutin’ ideas for deep-frying condiments.ĭeep-fried butter debuted at the Texas State Fair before spreading to state fairs around the country.īalls of frozen butter are dipped into a sugary buttermilk batter and then fried.

“Technically, that recipe is a little more than a quarter-pounder,” says Geary. It’s not as unhealthy as it sounds, either. Hailing from the Iowa State Fair, this beaut is three beef patties and six slices of American cheese wedged between a Krispy Kreme donut sliced in half. Some fair foods are, dare we say it, healthy. So I pulled pork sandwiches and stuff like that.” “Because that’s what a lot of people think of fair foods – everything’s fried. “I didn’t want them all fried foods,” he tells CNN Travel. People are trying to top each other every year.”Īs a former cake contest judge and then culinary coordinator for the Los Angeles County Fair, Geary knows his mozzarella sticks from his fried cheese balls.īut that’s not to say every recipe in Fair Foods requires firing up the deep fryer. “Honestly, my foods in the book are not weird compared to some of the stuff coming out now. “It’s a way to get you over there to those vendors,” he says. “Offbeat” is the key word here, as Geary notes throughout the book how the creators of culinary oddities such as fried Snickers often develop their recipes while trying to outdo each other for the weirdest food. The expert on these foods is George Geary, author of the book “Fair Foods: The Most Popular and Offbeat Recipes from America’s State & County Fairs.” County fairs, state fairs, street fairs – you name it, and they’re selling fried food on a stick at it. Nowhere is that more true than on United States fairgrounds.

When you get a sno-cone, do you mix flavors or just get one flavor?ġ7.If there’s one culinary truism about Americans, it’s that we can deep-fry anything. How finely shaven is the ice in your ideal sno-cone?ġ6. If you were going to have a sno-cone stand and you could only sell one other thing at that stand besides sno-cones, what would you sell and why?ġ5. What are your 15 most cherished sno-cone related memories?ġ4. Do you like to suck out a lot of the syrupy part then have a more icey experience later on, or do you try to maintain a consistent syrup/ice ratio throughout the whole experience, or do you eat the ice off the top and then have a syrupy reward at the end?ġ3. What foods would be best to have such that a sno-cone would be the most taste-tacular dessert?ġ2. What are the conditions under which you would choose an ice-cream cone over a sno-cone, and vice-versa?ġ1. What are the sorts of contexts in which you find yourself wanting a sno-cone?ġ0. Do you go to one of those pretentious sno cone parlours that puts cream on it or whatever and gives it some fancy-shmancy european name, or what?ĩ. How much syrup/flavor do you like on there?Ĩ. Do you prefer an actual sno-cone or do you just like the stuff in a dish?ħ. What are some flavors that don't exist but that you wish they existed and if they do some day come into existence you'll totally try them?Ħ. What are some flavors of sno-cones that you've seen around and always meant to try but then every time you go to the sno-cone stand you end up going with a flavor that you KNOW is good because you're worried that if you get the new flavor and then that flavor isn't very good that you've just wasted your time and pocket change on a sub-par sno-cone experience?ĥ.

What are some flavors of sno-cones that you had and didn't like very much?Ĥ. What are your favorite flavors of sno-cones?ģ.

Old fashioned carnival snow cones