Listling With Brief Commentary: 53 Fried Foods I Didn’t Eat At The Texas State Fair

feature image from pegasusnews.com

After eating fried food for four days straight during a New Orleans trip, my girlfriend and I decided to give up fried food for a year. We’ve refused the free chips and salsa at every Tex-Mex restaurant, we’ve avoided going to our favorite sports bar for fried pickles and wings and we’ve endlessly asked every waiter, “Is this fried?” Nonetheless, we’ve been going strong since April 1 without any crispy, golden deliciousness.

Dreaming of the day I can EAT YOU UP!

Dreaming of the day I can EAT YOU UP!

I went to the Texas State Fair — a haven for everything deep fried and on a stick — for the first time this past weekend. And I still did not eat fried foods. I lived vicariously through the wild, free souls gorging on things like “Fried PB&J.”

53 Fried Foods I Didn’t Eat At The Texas State Fair

1. Doritos Cool Ranch Fried Pizza

2. Fernie’s Deep Fried King Ranch Casserole

3. Deep Fried Cuban Roll

4. Fried Guacamole

5. Fried Thanksgiving Dinner

6. Fried Jambalaya

7. Awesome Deep Fried Nutella

8. Deep Fried Elote

9. Deep Fried Spaghetti and Meatball

10. Fried Grilled Cheese Sandwich

11. Deep Fried Oreos

12. Fried Spinach Dip Bites

13. Southern Style Chicken-Fried Meatloaf

14. Golden Fried Millionaire Pie

15. Deep Fried Chocolate Chip Burrito

16. Loaded Avocado Crispy Fries

17. Spicy Spam Empanadas

18. Texas Fried Fireball

19. Deep Fried Shrimp and Grits

20. Deep Fried Creole Boulette

21. Deep Fried BBQ Wontons

22. Fried Collard Greens

23. Fried Bacon Cinnamon Roll

24. Fried Bubblegum

25. Fried Beer

26. Fried Cactus

27. Fried Coke

28. Fried Cookie Dough

29. Cajun Fried Turkey Legs

30. Fried Chicken Skin

31. Fried Loaded Mashed Potatoes

32. Fried Snickers

33. Fried Cake Balls

34. Viva Las Vegas Fried Ice Cream

35. Fried Star Crunch

36. Fried Latte

37. Fried Frozen Margarita

38. Deep Fried Biscuit and Gravy

39. Fried Queso Bites

40. Fried Chicken Flapjack on a Stick

41. Deep Fried Mac N Cheese Sliders

42. Fried Banana Pudding

43. Fried Ribs

44. Fried Mozzarella Cheese Sticks

45. Fried Pina Colada

46. Fried Broccoli Cheese Bacon Bites

47. Fried Cheesecake

48. Texas Fried Frito Chili Pie

49. Fried Mexican Fire Crackers

50. Fried Butter

51. Potato Twirl

52. Ultimate Fried Hamburger

53. Funnel Cake (obvs)

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!
Related:

Yvonne

Yvonne S. Marquez is a lesbian journalist and former Autostraddle senior editor living in Dallas, TX. She writes about social justice, politics, activism and other things dear to her queer Latina heart. Yvonne was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley. Follow her on Instagram or Twitter. Read more of her work at yvonnesmarquez.com.

Yvonne has written 205 articles for us.

72 Comments

  4. Nobody can tell me a state fair beats Texas’s. Nobody.
    FRIED SAMOAS were not on this list, but they are heaven. Also Texas twisters fried sweet potato

    • It’s also one of the most important state fairs in the country seeing as automakers actually introduce new truck models at the fair.

    • Not to start anything between our state, but the State Fair of Oklahoma has Indian tacos. I don’t care what you fry, you can beat Indian fry bread with a taco on it. PERIOD.

    • I have more than one friend who fries oreos at home. It is truly an art that I am not ready for yet.

  6. Reading this list made me simultaneously disgusted and hungry. How even do they fry half of these things? Oh, Texas.

  7. The more I try to think about how fried bubblegum would even work, the more confused I’m getting.

    Man, and I thought Iowa was weird about all the fried food at the state fair.

  8. Huge congratulations for State Fair self-discipline (I definitely could not have done it) :D
    My question is: why are so many amazing-sounding foods only on a screen in front of me instead of in my mouth? Because if somebody else has given them up, it’d basically basically restoring cosmic balance for me to eat them all… right?

  9. While I’m reading this list, I’m also making a face that no emoticon could possibly describe.

  10. i admire your strength, because i could never say no to any of these. especially funnel cake. my answer is always yes to funnel cake.

    my gf also recently mastered the art of homemade gluten-free funnel cake (and gluten-free fried oreos), so i’m pretty much done for. fried foods are my everything.

  11. I consider myself a connoisseur of state fair fried food, and fried Coke is my white whale. I want to try it so badly. Unfortunately, it seems to strictly be a southern thing. I only ever see it mentioned when talking about southern state fairs. Sigh. I’ve had fried Kool Aid, though. It was disappointing.

      • When my friend tried the fried beer she described it as a fried piece of ravioli with warm beer inside.

    • Generally you mix whatever the thing is in with the batter, so then it’s like whatever the thing is flavored nuggets. There’s a guy at the New York state fair that will fry anything you give him. Someone gave him whiskey, so he just used the whiskey as part of the liquid for the batter and deep fried it.

      With Coke, I think they use Coke syrup concentrate for fountain machines, and then put more of the syrup on top as a sauce.

    • I agree but also I’m really sad that you’re not eating the chips & salsa, Yvonne, because I have been craving nothing else since Camp. Did you know that Tostitos Hint of Lime is impossibly hard to get here?? I’m so sad. So sad.

    • i’m also confused about the chips — are chips FRIED? i feel like maybe i’m confused about what “fried” means.

      • Yes, most chips are fried. Unless they specify “baked!” on the bag, which is a health thing, because…

        Frying just means cooking something in hot oil or fat (think of how a stir-fry is all that good stuff cooked in peanut or vegetable oil). But most if not all of the stuff listed above is deep-fried, meaning it is completely immersed in hot oil (think of fast-food french fry baskets).

        Frying makes things delicious in a variety of ways, partly because it makes them greasy and fatty and humans generally like the taste of that, and partly because when done right it keeps the insides moist and the outsides crispy (fried chicken, french fries, etc), which is a product of the oil being so hot that it cooks the outside perfect and fast and that forms a seal preventing the oil from actually soaking into the item being fried, and also trapping the item’s original moisture inside (again, tender juicy delicious perfect fried chicken).

        Science is delicious.

        • So yes, tortilla chips are prepared by cutting up tortillas and dropping them in hot oil. Potato chips are the same, but potato instead of tortilla. Because they’re so thin, they get crispy all the way through.

  13. I’m most confused by the things that aren’t wholly solid?! Beer?? Guacamole? Spinach dip?

    We are living in the future.

    • I’m pretty sure that the beer is just straight beer batter like you’d put on fish or onion rings, except just, well, the batter. Ugh.

    • See my above comment about a ravioli full of beer. Whether that’s really what happens, or it is more of a beer batter like what Jenkin described, it sounds awful.

  14. This “Listling” and all the comments make my day! But we all know the real winner here is Texas.
    We are a hot, proud, strange, confused, amazing, mess of a place.

    Fucking Texas y’all. Fried food paradise and your heart’s hell.

  15. one time, i lived in a flat that had a communal deep fryer (mostly purchased out of a desire to get drunk and deep fry each other’s non-food possessions)

    i am ashamed to admit that after that experience, nothing on this list surprised me, and i have probably tried and/or made more than half of them.

  16. Wait. Fried butter? First that seems really gross to me. Second, isn’t that unsafe? It would be hot and melty and probably burn you. I think it’s best you didn’t eat it, we wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.

  17. Dude, the Texas State Fair sounds so much better than the Alabama National Fair. I might put it on my calendar for next year…

  18. What in the world is a million dollar pie? Is that a Texas thing? And now you have me curious about the Cool ranch pizza. I’ve had deep fried pizza before when I was in the UK(it was overly salty), but I wonder how they do the cool ranch, any pics?

  19. I don’t understand the fascination with deep frying everything.
    I wouldn’t want any of those items listed…

  22. I spent the last two summers in Edinburgh and I thought Scotland was the home of fried madness – loads of chip shops have deep fried haggis and deep fried Mars bars – but it pales in comparison to Texas. Fried Coke! I can’t even wrap my brain around the idea of that.

  24. State fair thoughts: when Big Tex (the animatronic giant talking cowboy) burned up last year, apparently people left corn dog bouquets as a sort of tribute/vigil. I can’t.

    • Exact same reason I need to never go to never go to Texas! I too would eat all of this. And I don’t even mean, I would eat one of everything, I mean ALL the food. The headline would be like “Enthusiastic Irish Girl Consumes Entire State Fair”

      • To add a bit of organisational structure to this – i think we, the contenders, would first have a drinking contest and then the winner’s honours would be to devour the entire fair.

        So go ahead, imagine yourself in the headlines more, if you jinx yourself hard enoungh you won’t make for qualification.

  30. “Deep Fried BBQ Wontons”

    Are they frying fried wontons? Re-frying? I don’t understand this stuff.

Comments are closed.