Burning Question: Has fair food gone too far?

Remember when fairgoers would stop in their tracks and gawk at that glaring red and yellow sign hawking fried alligator—and on a stick, no less?

Yes, there was a time when funnel cakes and such were novelty items—a simpler time, when cell phones had convenient flip covers, Netscape Navigator brought the world to your fat desktop computer with a whopping 8MB of memory through a handy dial up landline.

Brace yourselves for a culinary ride. At fairgrounds today, one is likely to encounter Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, wrapped in bacon and deep fried. Or frozen margaritas, also deep fried. Perhaps a burger is more to your taste? Well, there’s a cheeseburger topped with fried ice cream out there. Steering clear of red meat? Look for the Cap’n Crunch chicken sandwich.

Pat Sutton, who operates the Funnel Cake Express stand once even tried out a bacon and baked beans version of the staple funnel cake.

“It was alright—people liked it,” he says. “Everything tastes good on a funnel cake.”

 Um...well, the bacon sounds nice.

Even during a stroll through the less adventurous Monterey County Fair, you may be tempted by a burger with doughnut halves in place of the sesame seed bun or chicken rolled in Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes before a dip in the fryer. One booth features the now requisite fried Twinkies. Another serves “Unicorn Shakes,” decked in marshmallows, rainbow ribbons of sour candy and pretty much “everything you can think of.”

Or so says veteran concessionaire Phil Delahoyde, the man responsible for the Unicorn Shake and the equally colorful Flamingo Shake.

Oddly enough, flamingo tastes like pomegranate.

By the way, Delahoyde is a second generation fair vendor who has appeared on the Cooking Channel series Carnival Eats five or six times—it’s hard to keep track when you operate a fleet of 14 stands setting up at dozens of events six months out of the year (including OMG Ice Cream and Stuffie’s Char-Broiled at the Monterey fairgrounds). Yet even he was once shocked by the shattering of culinary bounds.

“When fried Twinkies came out I thought that was too far,” he recalls. “But now we fry everything. At the fair we don’t have food rules. No calories, either.”

No time to fact check—college football season is underway—so I’ll have to take his word on that.

What happened? Why did Americans so hesitant to sample alligator on a stick suddenly embrace Elvis on a stick?

Well, carnival scholars...Oh, Elvis on a stick is a peanut butter cup wrapped in bacon, slathered with mashed banana and deep fried, if you didn’t already know.

Carnival scholars generally blame the Texas State Fair. Writing for the History Channel (in a rare break between the network’s pursuit of ancient aliens), Stephanie Butler points out that gilded age expositions offered fancy sit down dinners of porterhouse steak. Walking around fare included popcorn or fruit—the phrase “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was coined at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, according to Butler.

While the famous St. Louis exhibition gets credit—rightly or wrongly—for a number of culinary and carnival creations, inventiveness is just bigger in Texas. While the eyes of the country were on places like Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942, the eyes of Texas were upon the newly presented corn dog.

OK—not such a big deal. It would take another 30 or 40 years for the funnel cake to join the corn dog on the carnival eats pantheon. But things began to spiral quickly out of control: the deep fried Twinkie, the deep fried Oreo, deep fried butter…

Yes, deep fried butter. Folks at the Iowa State Fair later tried to one-up the Lone Star braggarts with deep fried butter on a stick—or, rather, an entire stick of butter on a stick, rolled in a cinnamon-honey batter.

“You expect something creative at the fair,” says Ben Wheeler of Stuffie’s Char-Broiled.

What happened was this: As vendors began to push the envelope, both fairgoers and those who manage expectations began to take notice. People started to expect something new each year. And in 2005, the Texas State Fair responded with the Big Tex Choice Awards, an invitation for traveling fair chefs to enter their most unique creations into a contest.

The finalists that year seem quaint in retrospect. There were sweet potato fries, fried meatballs, white chocolate bread pudding and a fried peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich, among others.

Hey, DirecTV still updated by landline—a simpler time.

Deep fried frozen latte followed, making national headlines. Vendors began testing deep fried beer, Coca-Cola, even lettuce. Just three years after the initial Big Tex awards, finalists ramped things up quite a bit: Fried banana split covered in powdered sugar, jelly beans fried in funnel cake batter, deep fried s’mores, a thing called “Fire & Ice” involving banana-laced whipped cream frozen in liquid nitrogen and chicken fried bacon.

Yes, chicken fried bacon. Take that, Escoffier! In the annals of culinary history, nothing finer or more satisfying has ever been presented to public.

Why it took so long for some kitchen genius to come up with chicken fried bacon is a question for another time.

And it’s not just everyday fare that ends up in the fryer. Delahoyde has wowed fairgoers (and TV host Noah Cappe) with offerings such as lobster fries and a lobster corn dog.

“It takes a lot more than it used to,” he says. People’s tastes are changing. They expect a better product.”

Where alligator was once a novelty, Chef TLC—installed in one of the permanent stands at Monterey fairgrounds—lists a full menu of Cajun dishes. One can find falafel and other global flavors, as well.

Oh, and grilled brussels sprouts. Way to take the fun out of fair food.

“We get a lot of flavor by putting them on the grill,” says Teri Contois of Chef TLC’s. “It’s a healthier twist—come for flavor without the guilt.”

Guilt? I heard that fair food has no calories.

And to (finally) answer this week’s Burning Question: No—for the moment. The traveling chef show continues to innovate, to find new flavor combinations and old things that have yet to meet the frying bin.

One day, perhaps. But not now.

What of corn dogs and funnel cakes, once wondrous and now so plain? Has fair food moved beyond the staples of summers past?

“No,” says Delahoyde firmly.