The 13 Wildest State Fair Foods Across America

American state fairs have been around since the early 19th century, when they were mostly held to celebrate farming and livestock. Since most modern state fair attendees are more interested in simply having fun (rather than learning about novel sheep breeds), these events have pivoted over the years to provide entertainment for the masses. Of course, food is such an integral part of the state fair experience that many go purely out of gastronomical curiosity, with bizarre fried foods becoming a genuine craze around the end of the 20th century.

In 2005, the State of Texas Fair introduced two food competitions, with awards given for best tasting menu item, and most creative food. Since then, vendors at state fairs across the U.S. have seemingly been in an arms race over who can concoct the most outlandish combination of sugar and frying oil served on a stick (among other wild offerings). And we fairgoers are the eager guinea pigs desperate to try it for ourselves.

While most State Fair cuisine is unlikely to have Michelin aspirations, when it comes to novelty?
Many of these foods are tough to beat. So from deep-fried jelly beans to chocolate-covered insects, we're taking a moment to appreciate some of the most daring culinary offerings served at state fairs across the U.S. over the years.

Tacos come in many varieties, so it's hardly scandalous to experiment with fillings. Still, no matter how outlandish your taco order has been over the years, you probably wouldn't have been prepared for whatever was going on with the watermelon tacos at the 2024 Arizona State Fair. First of all, there was no tortilla involved, corn or flour-based. Instead, the dish is made of a hollowed out watermelon "shell" holding a large dollop of pineapple Dole Whip soft serve topped with Tajín seasoning and a tamarind candy straw.

As far as fair foods go, the watermelon taco was practically a health food. None of the ingredients were fried, and the soft serve was even dairy-free. If you were at the fair looking for a gluten-free treat with comparatively minimal calories, this might have been your best option. Beyond that, though, the combination of refreshing watermelon, creamy pineapple soft serve, spicy, savory Tajín, and sweet-and-sour tamarind sounds delicious.

It's a bold recipe, but unlike many of the other state fair foods that seem geared towards novelty more than flavor, this one seems like a home run on both counts. One fairgoer on TikTok deemed it "the most refreshing thing I've ever eaten in my whole life," and ranked it 12 out of 10 stars. Considering the climate in Phoenix, any food that's refreshing is guaranteed to be a hit.

Breading and frying a hot dog makes sense; the textures are compatibly soft and crunchy, with the bread complementing the meat. Frying cake is also a time honored success, with sugar, fat, and flour creating a heavenly combination. Conversely, jelly beans are hard, intensely sweet, and so small they'd run the risk of slipping through most frying baskets — though that hasn't stopped state fair vendors from frying them.

Of course, if no one's attempted to deep fry something before, you can pretty much guarantee a state fair vendor will experiment with it at least once. Fried jelly beans have previously made an appearance at both the State Fair of Texas and the Big E fair in Massachusetts. In both instances, they were fried in funnel cake batter, which significantly increased their proportions to the extent that you were basically just eating funnel cake with jelly beans as a surprise filling, like raisins in a carrot cake.

Pickles are delicious in many recipes, from tuna salad to a bloody Mary. But it takes a special kind of bravery to pair them with Pop Rocks. At the 2024 Florida State Fair, attendees were able to sample the resulting creation, which — like any self-respecting fair food — was served on a stick.

The more you learn about the recipe, the stranger it becomes. First, there was the kosher pickle, which was rolled in a Fruit Roll-Up, covered in chocolate, and then rolled in Pop Rocks. Other options in place of the exploding candy included Flamin' Hot Cheetos (which probably tasted even weirder with the chocolate than the Pop Rocks did) and Fruity Pebbles.

Reporters from the Tampa Bay Morning Blend had mixed reactions, with one sounding pleasantly surprised, while another seemed as though they wouldn't take one more than one bite. None of the ingredients are difficult to acquire and the assembly doesn't appear to require any special equipment, so if this recipe sounds intriguing to you, you can probably replicate it at home, if you dare.

In 2021, a pregnancy craving led to one of the most viral chocolate bars of all time when Sarah Hamouda combined chocolate and the Arab dessert knafeh into one sugary treat. The result is a Dubai chocolate bar filled with pistachio, tahini, and filo pastry, and it became such a viral sensation that it caused an international pistachio shortage in 2025. It was only a matter of time before this global sensation hit the state fair food stalls, and in 2025? It did.

The Dubai chocolate corndog at the Arkansas State Fair sounds like the ultimate pregnancy craving mashup — an all-beef hot dog encased in corndog batter, drizzled with chocolate and pistachio, and sprinkled with shredded filo pastry. One fairgoer pronounced the creation to be surprisingly delicious, noting that the combination of sweetness and saltiness worked beautifully. It's true: the sweet and salty formula is one of the best there is, providing us with everything from chocolate-covered pretzels to kettle corn. The Dubai chocolate corndog seems like a match made in state fair heaven.

Cotton candy is one of the most ubiquitous menu items at state fairs and carnivals around the U.S., and burgers are a classic comfort food, so you can see the thought process that might have gone into the cotton candy burger at the 2025 California State Fair.

It was made of two burger patties smothered in cheese and topped with a thick cloud of pink cotton candy, all sandwiched between a toasted burger bun. As if that weren't enough, the creation was crowned with one puff of blue cotton candy, secured to the bun with a wooden skewer. You'd struggle to open your mouth wide enough to bite into every layer, but it certainly had visual flair.

As for the flavor, you'd have to be on board with a sweet-and-savory profile in a burger, which isn't actually that much of a stretch. In fact, adding brown sugar to your meat can transform your burgers from good to gourmet, so why not go the extra mile and use cotton candy instead?

Perhaps the pinnacle of state fair food madness is deep-fried butter. It's the sort of gimmick that we Americans like to tell tourists about just to see the flabbergasted looks on their faces. The first question, of course, is how you even fry butter. It melts in moderately warm ambient temperature; how could it possibly withstand the blistering heat of frying oil? The answer is that it doesn't.

There are multiple state fairs that boast fried butter on their menus, but the process is usually the same: you start with cold butter, dip it into batter, and then fry it. The results are mostly fried dough with a liquid butter center. Bite into these bad boys and you'll have butter running down your arms.

At the Iowa State Fair in 2011, fried butter was added to the menu as a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the fair's life-size butter cow sculpture. The creation was made of a two-ounce piece of butter dipped in cinnamon batter and served on a stick. In Texas, deep-fried butter has been a mainstay since 2009, where it usually takes the shape of deep-fried balls of batter eaten with your fingers. It might not be the healthiest fair food out there, but by most accounts, it's absolutely worth the calories.

Chocolate can be shaped into pretty much anything. All you have to do is make a mold, pour in melted chocolate, and wait for it to harden. It would therefore have been fairly simple for the vendors at the Arizona State Fair to simply make scorpion-shaped chocolate rather than actual scorpions covered in chocolate, but they went all-in on the latter option.

Eating bugs is nothing new. Believe it or not, humans have been eating them since prehistoric times, and there are still many bug and insect-eating practices around the globe. But now that we can have our fill of any number of meaty, juicy proteins, why would we choose a spiky insect whose mere presence in our homes is usually enough to make us jump?

To make matters worse, the chocolate-covered scorpion at the 2010 Arizona State Fair was not even fried, which left little to the imagination for anyone brave enough to eat one. Without a thick layer of crispy batter, the scorpion was really allowed to shine, for better or for worse. One reporter for the Phoenix New Times was appalled by the flavor, describing it as a bitter combination that hovered somewhere between poison and gasoline. In other words, it was exactly as unpalatable as it sounded.

One of the most recent fair foods to go viral was Indiana's pickle fried Oreos, which were made with a golden Oreo topped with a pickle slice, dipped in batter, and fried. To finish things off was a sprinkle of pickle seasoning and a side of ranch dressing. Did it taste good? Well, according to festival-goers, it somehow did. "The Oreo pickle thing is weird," one of them told WXIN-TV Indianapolis. "It's kind of just like a fried pickle with Oreo cream in the middle, but surprisingly, really good."

One taste tester for the IndyStar gave the concoction four out of five stars, while noting his colleagues didn't find it nearly as enticing. Perhaps if you're a fan of sweet, sour, and savory all in one food, it would hit the spot. For others, the collision of sensibilities was a bridge too far. But that's the beauty of fair food. You can always expect that at least one of the items on offer will cross your personal culinary line, which is more than can be said for most restaurants.

For whatever reason, Utah has had a long history of loving Jell-O. It's so beloved that in 2001, the state legislature voted to name the wobbly dessert the state's favorite snack — as if legislation were needed to prove the obvious. Utah is the state that eats twice as much Jell-O as any other, and it consumes about twice as much green lime-flavored Jell-O as the rest of the global population. So it should come as no surprise that an enterprising vendor at the Utah State Fair should attempt to fry it. The only question was: how?

Jiggly cubes of prepared Jell-O are mostly water, and frying water (please never try this at home) leads to lots of exploding oil – and not much else. Instead, the vendors simply poured green Jell-O powder into a batter and then squirted the batter into frying oil. What emerged looked something like a green-tinted funnel cake, which is a lot less sensational than what you might have imagined when you heard about fried Jell-O. Still, it became the vendor's top-selling menu item, and was so popular that fairgoers frequently had to wait in line to order it.

What do you get when you cross a classic Tex-Mex dish with a classic state fair food? Cotton candy tacos, of course. This creation appeared at the Texas State Fair in 2018, where it made a splash with the judges of the annual Big Tex Choice Awards. The s'mores-themed treat consisted of a homemade waffle cone made with graham crackers that was shaped into a taco shell and filled with cotton candy, toasted marshmallows, and chocolate. For a garnish, it was covered in marshmallow glaze and sprinkled with chocolate cookie crumbles. To gild the lily, there were also biscuit sticks with marshmallows on them.

The amount of sugar in each of these "tacos" must have been astronomical, but the father-son duo behind the invention stressed that it was organic and non-GMO. The dessert did not win the prize that year for the best tasting sweet concoction, but it was innovative enough to win the prize for the most creative menu item.

Funnel cake is a state fair staple across the country. The concept is simple: just drizzle some cake batter into frying oil in a roundabout, circular motion until you have something akin to a flat, bird's-nest-shaped donut. They are delicious, and they have weathered just about every culinary variation you can imagine. One of those variations took fair food innovations to new heights. In 2017, the funnel cake bacon queso burger hit fairgoers' stomachs at the Texas State Fair, and it made an impression. It consisted of funnel cake instead of burger buns, sandwiching a hamburger patty, bacon, and queso.

Texas is known for upping the ante with its state fair food offerings, which is really saying something given how outlandish this wing of the culinary world is across the country, but even by those standards, the funnel cake bacon queso burger became a media sensation. It even made an appearance on the Today Show that year, with guest host Scott Wolf calling it nothing short of "incredible." It was a hit with Big Tex Choice Awards judges, too, who not only named it the most creative food of the year, but also the best-tasting savory food of the year.

Watermelon needs no embellishments. In fact, its strength is its simplicity, that refreshing flavor rivaled only by cucumber. But a state fair is a state fair, and if it's serving watermelon, you know there'll be some kind of over-the-top twist. Multiple fairs have done their own variations of deep-fried watermelon, from the one at the North Carolina State Fair that looked like a corndog to the ones in California and Arizona that looked deceptively similar to a simple wedge of watermelon covered in powdered sugar.

Since frying delicious foods is one of the main responsibilities of state fair concessionaires, this might not sound that wild. But it's a little more intriguing when you take into account that frying up plain watermelon is highly dangerous. Oil and water do not mix, so when you put an item that is mostly water into frying oil, you are going to get a lot of spitting, scalding oil that can cause serious injury. That means that any type of fried watermelon you get will be covered in batter.

The heat helps concentrate the watermelon flavor, but it also removes that innate refreshing quality that makes the fruit so popular in the first place. If you're looking for something refreshing, you'd be better off chugging a glass of ice water, but if you're on the lookout for a watermelon flavored dessert, you could do much worse than battered and fried watermelon.

How on Earth does one go about frying beer? Mark Zable spent years trying to figure this out, even consulting a food scientist at one point, but to no avail. While he credited his four-year-old with finally cracking the code, he deemed the recipe too hard-won and innovative to divulge after debuting at the State Fair of Texas in 2010.

Zable's fried beer looked more like ravioli than an alcoholic beverage. Broadly speaking, it was made by putting Guinness into a salty dough and dunking it in oil just long enough to cook the dough but not long enough to burn off the alcohol. It won the award for most creative food at the fair in 2010 and garnered interest from beer enthusiasts from across the globe.

Even if Zable may never reveal the secret to his creation, it isn't difficult to mimic the flavor combination. As he himself has said, fried beer tastes similar to taking a bite of a pretzel followed by a swig of Guinness, so you may as well just do that instead of spending the next few years trying to figure out how to combine them.