Ah, the Delaware State Fair. It is, literally, everything.
The braying of livestock, the breaking of demolition cars against each other, air so sticky it becomes its own souvenir. The delighted or terrified screams of children, being flung through the air by large machines.
Country music. Gabriel Iglesias. Rappers you hadn’t thought about in a while.
And, of course, food you never thought you’d eat.
In the first hours of the fair on Thursday, we tried the goofiest, wildest and most unlikely treats we could find at the state fair’s labyrinth of funnel-caked food stalls.
We sought out Cheeto-dusted cheese dogs and pickle pizza. Bites made of alligator, sausage made of fish, “tacos” made with beer batter and hamburgers made with doughnuts.
All will be available at the state fairgrounds in Harrington — alongside a lot of deep-fried Oreos — from midday to late each day until the fair closes on Saturday, July 29.
Here are the most unlikely foods we found at the Delaware State Fair, ranked from “What? yes!” to “Oh, God, why?”
Beer-battered beef ‘tacos’ at Deep Fried Tacos
On the food-court main drag, dubbed “Williams Street” on the fair map
The taco at Deep Fried Tacos is not a taco — not unless you’re in Honduras, where tacos can resemble crispy flautas. It is also not quite a chimichanga, the famously accidental deep-fried burrito of Arizona.
It is instead a loose improvisation that would perplex Mexico: a flour tortilla plastered shut and filled with the stuff of 1980s-era Midwestern taco salad. “Taco sauce.” Ground beef. The sort of taco seasoning you still find in packets at the supermarket. Sour cream, iceberg “shrettuce” and diced tomatoes. Orange cheese.
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Then, the flour-wrapped zeppelin is beer-battered and dunked in hot oil the same way you’d do a cod filet at a soccer bar.
Oh, God, it’s great: a fatty and beefy riot of flavor that’s crispier than a roofer in August. For those of us raised by mothers whose “taco night” involved crispy shells and taco sauce made by an American food conglomerate, it arrives with nostalgia so intense it almost makes you dizzy.
Upshot: The deep-fried taco is wrong. And in its wrongness, it is right. It is, therefore, a perfect fair food. 10/10, would try again.
Gator bites at Chester’s Gators and Taters
Williams Street main drag
Foods concocted because they rhyme rarely fare well. But success is possible!
The “taters” in question are french fries, which taste like french fries. The “gators” are deep-fried bits of a giant predatory reptile that can run 30 miles an hour on land. (Did you know this? It’s terrifying.)
But unlike the greasy-rubber dinosaur meat served as a novelty item at 10,000 biker bars and beach shacks all over the country, these gator bites actually are tasty. Well-seasoned breading, tangy-spicy orange-mayo Boom Boom dipping sauce, meat with the flavor of gamey poultry and the approximate texture of shrimp.
If all gator bites tasted as good as this, they’d be afraid of us instead of vice versa.
Upshot: The fries are fine. The gator bites are delicious. The gator is also available atop mac and cheese, which we didn’t have a chance to sample. We’d try that option next time, but with a side of Boom Boom.
Crab sausage at Kirby & Holloway
Williams Street main drag
Delaware’s Kirby & Holloway has been making scrapple and bratwurst for 75 years in Harrington. And at the fair, your cashier might be the enthusiastic third generation of Kirby, under the watchful eye of his mother.
You can order a classic brat, which is all meat and snap. You also can opt for the iron-rich undertow of their classic scrapple on white bread.
But you’re at the fair. The fair is for adventure. So, order a version of sausage that can be hard to find except at country stores: a Chesapeake Bay “crab” sausage made with a mix of pork and whitefish and the seasoning of Chesapeake crabs.
Bite in, and you get the snappy pop of bratwurst casing and an initial burst of pork flavor. Then, suddenly, your mouth fills with the intense and sea-salty brine of crab. (Though, again, it’s cod and other whitefish.) The grilled crab brat comes by default with onions and peppers.
Upshot: You won’t need mustard or any sauce at all. The sausage has more than enough flavor already. But do buy a bottle of their Nor’Easter hot sauce: It’s roasty, balanced and full of chili pepper flavor without being overwhelmed by the vinegar of many hot sauces.
BBQ Parfait at Delmarva BBQ
East side of the food court. I.e., east of Williams Street
The barbecue parfait is the kind of carnival food that has countless claimed “inventors” from Maine to Missouri. It’s a magic trick designed for Instagram: a clear-cupped layer cake that looks like a Dairy Queen dessert but consists of barbecue and barbecue sides.
In its way, it is a sensible food, a meat-and-three platter that you can eat out of a cup while walking to the puppet show at the kids’ stage. And so it makes sense that the Delmarva BBQ truck, with a brick-and-mortar in Seaford, would bring it to the fair.
Of all fair’s BBQ stalls, Delmarva’s smelled most strongly of actual wood smoke, and the meat backed this up: The brisket is blessedly tender without being merely soft, with a ribbon of bark and smoke ring, and a low undercurrent of smoky flavor.
The layers in their parfait go as follows: coleslaw topper, then choice of meat, then beans, then mac and cheese, and then more meat. But though the ribbons of slaw and bean and mac look pretty in pictures, the parfait still felt a little like somebody slid their plate into a Solo cup.
Upshot: I’d eat the parfait again without a moment’s complaint. But as a walking-around food, I’d vote for a brisket sandwich: I wanted more one-on-one time with the meat.
Pickle pizza at Spaghetti Eddie’s
Williams Street main drag
Spaghetti Eddie’s is an Italian-American carnival mainstay, one of those professionally itinerant food stalls that might turn up anywhere from Minnesota to Mineola.
They’re best known for “pizza on a stick,” essentially a sort of spiraling stromboli wrapped around a convenient handle. But this year, I instead went for the first slice of pickle pizza served at the Delaware State Fair.
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Spaghetti’s pickle slice offers crispy crust of the boardwalk-pizza school, topped with mozzarella and a blanket of dill pickles, even more dill, and then a garlic Parm sauce — a fusion invention first made in the Polish-German land of Rochester, New York, where cream and pickles are loved wherever they can be found.
But it should be noted: We do not live in such a place.
Upshot: I enjoyed it, but it was probably a one-and-done. The pickle slice was both better than I thought it would be, and much too sour for a pizza. It was a howlingly pucker-faced take on arguably the country’s most comfortable comfort food.
Hot chix and waffles at Prime Beef “Hot Chix”
East of Williams Street
When I saw the sandwich, I thought I’d hit the jackpot: Hot Chix and Waffles.
Someone, I wrongly believed, had the simple sense to combine two great things: chicken and waffles, and Nashville-style hot chicken. In walkable waffle-sandwich form, no less!
Alas, the chicken at Hot Chix is not hot: It is instead low in seasoning, spice and crispness. The “hot chix” at this Connecticut-based fair stall apparently refers to the voluptuousness of the hen that adorns its sign.
Upshot: With its sticky syrup and bacon on a chewy Belgian-ish waffle bun, the Hot Chix and Waffle, one of myriad variations on breaded-chicken sandwich, remains a serviceable wafflewich. But if you want it hot, you’ll have to ask for self-serve sauce.
Cheeto-dust cheesedog at Tuk Tuk Thai
Williams Street main drag
Tuk Tuk Wings and Thai Station is a Delaware food truck that on other days might serve red-curry rice bowls, dumplings and drunken noodles.
Their trademark Thai-spiced wings were in attendance at the fair. So were a lovely looking mango and coconut rice, some macaroonlike desserts and boba tea whose tapioca is dished fresh into housemade tea flavors.
But it’s the state fair. So Tuk Tuk got experimental with a street food better known in Korea: Cheeto-dusted corn dogs.
But in addition to hot dogs, Tuk Tuk offered a lesser-traveled Korean treat: the cheese dog. In essence, this is a TGI Friday’s-style mozzarella cheese stick crossed with a corn dog, then dusted with green or red Cheeto powder. The world is ever new.
In some ways, it was amazing. East Asian snacks are the world’s most prolific laboratory for conflicting textures, and this was no exception. The cheese dog was multiple versions of chewy and crispy: pliable and droopy cheese, the soft give of breading, the rumbling crackle of Cheeto.
That said, it was probably too interesting. I’m not sure I’d get it again.
But the cheese dog was perhaps the essence of fair food: a feeling I could expect to have nowhere else.
Upshot: Amid all the bold-flavored junk food of the fair, I found myself looking longingly instead at Tuk Tuk’s mango coconut rice. Don’t I, too, deserve a piece of fruit? Just this once?
Donut Burger at ‘Bucket O Fries’
West of Williams Street
Here, after countless fair-food experiments, is where it all fell apart:
The doughnut burger is like one of those trompe l’oeil burgers that instead turn out to be made of cake. In this case, the burger, lettuce and tomato are real. The “buns,” however, are doughnuts heated and refried on a flat top.
The tomato seemed strange and cold against the hot melting glaze of the doughnut. But removing it was a mistake, it turned out.
My next bite delivered the full and undampened force of beef grease and doughnut grease and sugar-crust all together, and my body rejected the resulting substance as if it were a foreign organ. NO, I said out loud, less to anyone around me than to the world itself. NO NO NO NO NO.
My colleague across the table just couldn’t stop laughing while I kept saying no: The state fair, finally, had defeated me.
Upshot: I need an apple. Maybe a fresh-picked peach and an antacid.
Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based reporter with USA TODAY Network. Reach him at mkorfhage@gannett.com.
