It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context.

Most years, we’re all about the food. On Thursdays vendors are encouraged to offer $3 specials, typically a bite-sized portion of an existing menu item or a chintzy, non-special drink. Our favorite part is the “Taste of the Fair” competition, in which vendors showcase ostensibly new dishes in hopes of enticing foodies and/or impressing attendees who seek more to fair-life than eating the same corn dog again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The TotF lineup is announced weeks in advance so everyone can plan their meals and experiments accordingly. If you didn’t feel like wandering the fairgrounds in search of the new items, fans could pick up a handy Taste of the Fair participants’ map at the Indiana State Police information booth. (This map was nowhere on their website, nor did State Fair officials bother to wake up their app, which hasn’t been updated since 2021. The map was an exclusively in-person freebie.)

Of the 30 Taste of the Fair contestants, we tried 11 of them across an 8-hour time span divided into two trips (long story) and walked off several of those cumulative calories doing laps around the fairgrounds. In time-honored internet listicle tradition, we’ve gone to the trouble of ranking them against each other. Enjoy!

11. Deep-Fried Corn on a Stick. Deep-frying remains a thing, though the fair’s foremost fried-dessert booth once again abstained from competition. Other entrepreneurs have taken up that culinary gauntlet with mixed results. Corn-based dishes were all the rage this year, but this variation on classic corn-on-a-cob yearned for thicker breading and went too easy on the herbs and/or spices. Worse still, if you mistakenly snapped off too much breading in one bite, the uncovered corn had no butter or salt; it was just plain, dull corn on a plain, dull stick.

10. Elote Pizza. We raise our expectations high every time a menu invokes the attention-grabbing phrase “street corn”. This year two different companies offered their takes on street corn pizza, which isn’t a stretch if you remember last year’s Taste of the Fair election winner was pickle pizza. Trailing its opponent in the distance, this imbalanced version was topped with jalapenos and crushed Doritos that overwhelmed the few herbs and all but suffocated the corn.

9. The Dirty Dog. We were just talking about corn dogs, weren’t we? Ah, but what if you extracted the ordinary hot dog, beloved meat of children and New Yorkers everywhere, and replaced it with a hipper-sounding “smoked burnt end brisket link”? And what if you left the ketchup in the fridge (whose usage anytime after breakfast is a felony in NYC anyway) and topped it with barbecue sauce instead? If you’re a carnivore-connoisseur, it’s a moderately manly upgrade. If you’re like Anne, your entire review after one bite is, “…it’s a corn dog.”

8. Cinnamon Crunch Corn. I wasn’t kidding about the corn proliferation. Given the serving options of either on-the-cob or in-a-bowl, diners were treated to steaming hot, generously buttered sweet corn bedecked with crushed Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and cream cheese icing. It’s a vegetable and a dessert! I could see this as a daily special at Jimmy McGill’s Cinnabon, where we’d make the same mistake we did here and gobble off the sugary layer too quickly.

7. Cherry Lemonade Twister. The Twisted Drinks and Food stand in front of the Indiana Arts Building (formerly the Home & Family Arts Building) is my favorite beverage stand. Whenever I’ve gotten bored with the bottled waters we bring along from home to save money, their tempting array of lemonade hybrids give me a refreshing change-up and the energy boost I need to drive us home after too many hours in the sun. Their latest drink is lemonade (with sugar or Splenda, your choice) plus grenadine plus real, sugar-coated maraschino cherries, yet another wonderful concoction to their credit. Why so low on the list? Their delivery system had a fatal flaw: the lids for their large-size cups have no holes in them, requiring one to lift up the lid ever so gently on one curved side, edge the straw through the gap at an angle, and try not to spill it all over oneself as one walks or drives. I’m a big fan of perfectly sealed drink lids, which is why I never buy Wild Bill’s Root Beer at comic-cons.

6. Smoked Bologna Burnt Ends. The superior challenger in the “burnt ends” sub-category caught my attention with its confident deviation from the old State Fair farmcore standbys that sell by the thousands yearly without any gussying-up. (Had this been “smoked steak tips”, I would’ve skipped it. Been there, eaten that.) This bologna platter is no mere Subway castoff, though, stepping into the game through a solid smoking process and thoughtful garnishes of possibly homemade pickles and pickled red onions. The TotF list claims it was also supposed to come with mustard, but we didn’t miss it.

Before we begin our Top Five Taste of the Fair 2023 Dishes, we pause for a very special INTERMISSION with Anne. Unlike me, she doesn’t limit herself to Taste of the Fair foods. She has her own customary must-eats to observe and celebrate here for the record.

Not pictured: her annual boneless pork sandwich. This year’s model looked much like last year’s, and the one from four years ago, and the ones from all the other years that we didn’t bother to photograph. One noticeable difference: this one took a ten-minute wait because at 10 a.m. most of the staff at the Indiana Pork Producers tent seemed dazed, mumbly, and unaware of their individual roles in the assembly line. They and we stood there motionlessly for several minutes in one big game of Red Light, Green Light, staring at each other with no barker around to yell, “GREEN LIGHT!” Upon noticing the few moving servers had skipped our order number, I stepped up to the counter, asked about our sandwich status, and sighed with some relief when a young gent apologized and took all of thirty seconds to personally slap a pork patty on a bun for my lovely, pork-deprived wife. That’s it, that’s the entire sandwich. Thus was her tradition eventually upheld.

And now, on with the countdown.

5. Buffalo Pork-‘n’-Mac. After I posted the Taste of the Fair rundown on Facebook the very day it was released, I soon learned I was obligated to try this dish because the owner of the Nitro Hog BBQ stand is the brother of one of my high school classmates. I don’t recall us ever having a conversation in any of the several classes we shared, but I don’t make the High School Alumni Facebook rules. I’m glad I followed them, though: I might’ve missed out on a hearty combination of perfectly cheesed-up mac-‘n’-cheese, Flavortown-ready pulled pork, spicy Buffalo sauce, and ranch dressing. It could’ve ranked even higher if not for the fierce competition and for my own personal Buffalo stance, by which I mean, had there been the option, I would’ve gone with Bleu cheese over ranch.

4. Nutellaphant Ear. I’ve always liked elephant ears more than funnel cakes, but funnel cakes get all the best toppings. At long last, some bold visionary realized elephant ears deserve more variants. We had to hunt for this big game over in the southeast corner of the fairgrounds, across from the kiddie rides. The combination is simple yet not necessarily obvious: elephant ear plus Nutella plus slices of strawberries and bananas, which happen to be my two favorite fruits. The process was labor-intensive and required a few extra minutes’ wait, but consider this patient judge sufficiently catered-to and wowed.

3. Lemon Drop Drizzle. Deep-fried desserts containing no chocolate whatsoever are illegal in sixteen states, but that didn’t stop a northwest-corner snack stand from daring nevertheless. Five “mini” sponge cakes are coated in lemon icing, doused in funnel cake batter, deep-fried golden (which in an alt-timeline is my Wild West gunslinger name), and luxuriously draped in powdered sugar and vanilla icing. Every bite was rich citrus bliss, which is a sensation you chocoholic youngsters out there will come to appreciate when you’re middle-aged and your tastes finally begin to change.

2. Street Corn Pizza. The year’s best corn-forward dish, sold at the Pizza-on-a-Stick stand across from Expo Hall, was also the official winner of this year’s Taste of the Fair competition. Warm, freshly baked dough was a blessed vehicle for fire-roasted corn, a homemade white sauce, mozzarella, Parmesan, chili lime seasoning, cilantro, and an adorably tiny lime wedge on top. The corn is the heart of each slice, yet has great chemistry with its well-meshed ensemble.

1. Pepperoni Pizza Pretzel. We used to chuckle every time we’d pass by the endless lines at Ben’s Soft Pretzels up on the north end because we didn’t get the fuss…but until now, I don’t think I’ve ever actually tasted a freshly baked pretzel straight out of an oven in my entire life. The secret is to walk up to the other, smaller, unaffiliated pretzel stand over by the Harvest Pavilion before 10 a.m., confirm they aren’t ready to serve customers yet, come back in fifteen minutes like a small child pestering them with “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”, then tell them you don’t mind waiting. After a giant pretzel finishes its initial routine bake, it’s dressed in pizza sauce, copious pepperoni, mozzarella ‘n’ Parmesan. Then they pop it back in the oven for a few more minutes until it achieves pizza nirvana on a different form of carbs altogether. I’m not sure we would’ve had the same experience at 4 p.m.; all I know is whatever magic they kept on tap for us early birds, something about their treatment surpassed my expectations. Now I get all those long lines for fresh pretzels.

I wish we’d had more time or stomach capacity to try some of the other Taste of the Fair dishes, but we can only handle so much, and we can only get in so many extra steps before heat exhaustion sets in.

To be continued! Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 2: The Year in Food Art
Part 3: The Year of Basketball
Part 4: The Year in Lego
Part 5: The Year in Art, 3-D Division
Part 6: The Year in Art, 2-D Division
Part 7: The Year in Animals
Part 8: The Year in Antiques
Part 9: The Year in Miscellany