Imade state fair food at home, and itwent about howyou’d expect
I trepidly removed my thumb from the opening of a funnel. A stream of batter gushed down into boiling-hot cooking oil, causing it to bubble up and up and up. As if in slow motion, the higher the liquid went up the sides of the pan and closer to the edge, the louder my panicked yelp got.
“AaaaaaaAAAAAH,” I wailed, helpless in the face of certain catastrophe.
I was manning the stove in my friend Lauren’s kitchen, in her lovely East End Houston home that — it seems noteworthy to mention — she had recently purchased. Luckily, the funnel cake did not burn the house down; we escaped the worst with moderate oil spill to clean up. The ordeal did, however, prompt Lauren and her fiancé to add an item to their shopping list they suddenly realized they didn’t have in their new home: a fire extinguisher.
Deep-frying large amounts of food at home is not something I ever intended to do, but quarantine has thrown us all out of our comfort zone. Shortly after the 2020 Texas State Fair was canceled in July, a company called State Fair to Go launched, promising to send disappointed fair lovers a box full of ingredients to make state fair food at home.
I was entering my credit- card information before I even looked at the fine print to see what this entailed. Once I ordered, I learned what I would be sent: enough to make curly fries, funnel dogs, fried okra, fried Oreos, funnel cake and a
turkey leg. I thought, “What did I get myself into?”
In late October, the box arrived. Though the list suggested a lot of food, it actually wasn’t much — the main ingredient was just a large bag of batter mix. The handful of other items came with brief recipes that read almost like the purposefully vague ones handed to “Great British Bake Off” contestants during the technical challenge.
With the box, some equipment and a gallon of vegetable oil in tow, I headed to Lauren’s one Saturday; she and our other friend Caitlin graciously agreed to join me in this journey.
Overall, the cooking actually went a lot smoother than expected, mostly thanks to a detailed run of show I wrote the night before in an attempt to reign in what I thought would be inevitable chaos. The curly fries and the turkey leg were
the easiest; as it turned out, they were already cooked and just needed reheating. Both tasted good.
The okra, on the other hand, was a disaster. I enjoy okra and don’t typically mind its sliminess, but this combination was a definite miss. It came in a plastic pouch, pre- chopped, marinating in raw batter. I squeezed the mixture and okra bits onto a sheet pan, wincing at its unappetizing look. The slime gummed up in the oven, and the batter, barely holding onto the okra, became flaky instead of crispy. It looked a mess. And for some reason, the recipe prompted us to pour packet gravy on top of it. It went mostly uneaten.
The dogs — which weren’t corn dogs but frankfurters fried in the same cake-batter mix as the desserts; hence, “funnel dogs” — were more successful,
at least taste-wise. It was difficult to fully and evenly coat the dogs, and when we slipped them in the frying oil, the batter immediately pooled down the sides of the dog, resulting in some rather inelegant shapes. But they tasted delicious, the sweet-and-savory combo a nice twist.
The fried Oreos definitely won the show. As we waited for what felt like eons for the pot of oil to reach the desired temperature, I shared my most unpopular food opinion — that Oreos are overrated — and we went on to debate the merits of other confections. The Oreos got a little soggy in the batter, and some crumbled because I overmixed, but it didn’t matter once tossed in the oil. They emerged golden brown and pretty decently shaped. I discovered that the Oreo, an underwhelming cookie (I said what I said), is greatly improved by a good old deep fry.
We ended with what I knew would be the most difficult: the funnel cake. The recipe simply directed to “drizzle batter,” which is not a sufficient instruction for the process of pouring batter through an actual funnel while making random circular motions into boiling oil. Without the YouTube tutorials, I would have been none the wiser.
After the first attempt that threatened to burn off my eyebrows, we switched to a deeper pot, which was safer but still didn’t do the trick. The batter was too thin, yielding a pile of scattered wispy, crumbly pieces instead of a uniform funnel cake. And yet, sprinkled with powdered sugar, the batter bits still tasted delicious.