A Completely Unhinged Ranking of State Fair Foods by How Hard They're Trying to Kill You (Affectionately)

Every August and September, Americans across this great nation make a pilgrimage to fairgrounds where they willingly hand over twelve dollars for a stick of butter that has been battered, deep-fried, and dusted with powdered sugar. Nobody is forcing them. Nobody is confused. This is a choice. This is America.

Here is a definitive ranking of the most aggressively fried foods in the state fair canon, ordered by how deeply they represent our collective decision to simply not think about it.

A Brief and Unnecessary History of Frying Things at Fairs

State fairs have existed in America since the mid-1800s, originally as agricultural exhibitions where farmers competed to grow the biggest pumpkin and judges took their jobs extremely seriously. Somewhere between then and now, we added a midway, a Ferris wheel, and a vendor who will fry literally anything you hand him if you give him forty-five seconds and eight dollars.

The deep fryer is believed to have made its state fair debut sometime in the early 20th century, and things escalated from there with the slow, inevitable momentum of a runaway funnel cake cart. Today, state fairs across the country host annual competitions for the most creative fried food, which is a real sentence that describes a real thing that happens in the United States of America, and we say that with nothing but love and mild concern.

Let us begin.

🌽 The Corn Dog — The Founding Father

Estimated Calories: 250–400 depending on your life choices

The corn dog is the George Washington of state fair food. Everything else exists in its shadow. A hot dog. Impaled on a stick. Dipped in cornmeal batter. Fried until golden. It is an elegant solution to the problem of "how do I eat a hot dog while also holding a balloon and watching a goat competition," and it deserves every ounce of its iconic status.

The corn dog requires no justification. It asks nothing of you. It simply exists, warm and perfect, and you eat it, and for thirty seconds nothing is wrong with the world.

Why This Exists: Because someone in the 1940s was a genius. We don't use that word lightly.

🧀 Deep-Fried Mac and Cheese Bites — The Logical Escalation

Estimated Calories: 400–600 per serving ("serving" being a generous term)

At some point, someone looked at macaroni and cheese — already a food that exists entirely to make you feel better about your afternoon — and thought, "What if we froze this, battered it, and dropped it in a vat of oil?" The answer, it turns out, is that you get something that is simultaneously too hot to eat and too good to stop eating, which is the state fair experience distilled to its purest form.

Deep-fried mac and cheese bites are crispy on the outside, molten on the inside, and will absolutely destroy the roof of your mouth because you will not wait for them to cool down. You never wait for them to cool down. Nobody waits for them to cool down. This is the human condition.

Why This Exists: Comfort food needed to become more comfortable, apparently.

🧁 Fried Oreos — The Moment Things Got Interesting

Estimated Calories: 150–200 per cookie (you will eat six)

Fried Oreos represent a philosophical turning point in state fair cuisine. Before fried Oreos, the rule was that you fried savory things, or things that were already kind of meant to be cooked. Fried Oreos said: no. No rules. A perfectly good sandwich cookie, dunked in funnel cake batter, dropped in hot oil, served with powdered sugar on top.

The result is a warm, slightly melty, crispy-edged thing that tastes nothing like an Oreo and everything like a decision you're going to be proud of. They debuted at the San Diego County Fair in 2002 and immediately spread across the country like a delicious, irresponsible idea.

Why This Exists: Because the person who invented it wanted to see what would happen. They got their answer. We all got their answer.

🧈 Fried Butter — The Point of No Return

Estimated Calories: 300–500 per piece (it's butter)

In 2009, a man named Abel Gonzales Jr. won the "Most Creative" award at the State Fair of Texas for deep-fried butter. We need to sit with that for a moment. Butter. Frozen into balls. Wrapped in dough. Deep-fried. Served with honey or cinnamon sugar.

This is not a food so much as it is a statement. A statement about freedom. A statement about what happens when you give Americans a fair, a fryer, and no adult supervision. Abel Gonzales Jr. is either a visionary or a warning. Possibly both. Definitely both.

Reader submission from Terrence W. in Dallas: "I ate one at the Texas State Fair and immediately called my mom. Not because I felt bad. Just because I felt like I needed to tell someone."

Why This Exists: Texas happened.

🥒 Fried Pickle Juice — The Final Boss

Estimated Calories: Unknowable. Some things man was not meant to count.

At the 2016 State Fair of Texas — Texas keeps showing up on this list, make of that what you will — a vendor introduced fried pickle juice shots. Not fried pickles. Not pickle-flavored anything. Pickle juice, the liquid, somehow solidified, battered, and fried into a form that could be consumed as a single shot.

This is either the peak of human ingenuity or evidence that we have fundamentally lost the plot. It's probably both. The flavor is apparently exactly what you'd expect: sour, salty, somehow crispy, and deeply confusing to every sensory system in your body simultaneously.

Reader submission from Jolene K. in Amarillo: "I tried one on a dare. I'm not going to tell you it was bad. I'm also not going to tell you it was good. I'm going to tell you it was real, and that some experiences live outside of traditional evaluation frameworks."

Why This Exists: Nobody knows. The vendor probably doesn't know. God may not know. It exists anyway.

The Unifying Theory of State Fair Food

Here is the thing about state fair food that nobody really wants to admit but everybody secretly understands: it's not about the food.

You can get a corn dog at a gas station. You can buy Oreos at any grocery store in America for three dollars. You can — and this is important — melt butter at home for free, at any time, without paying eight dollars and standing in a line next to a man in a cowboy hat.

But you don't. Because state fair food is about the context. It's about the smell of the midway and the sound of the Tilt-A-Whirl and the specific kind of abandon that only comes from being surrounded by prize-winning livestock and funnel cake vendors. It's permission, granted once a year, to eat something ridiculous and feel nothing but joy about it.

America has a lot of problems. The state fair is not one of them. The state fair is, in fact, the solution.

Now go get yourself some fried butter. You've earned it. We have absolutely no idea what you've done to earn it, but we're confident you have.

Have a state fair food submission so unhinged we haven't covered it? Send it to us. We will judge it. We will also be impressed. We are easy to impress when it comes to this.

Pointlesspedia reminds you to drink water, eventually.