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. Each time 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 tenderloin 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. This year’s Taste of the Fair dishes and drinks number 33 on their official map and 39 on the official site. As of this writing I’m unsure what the six unmapped vendors did to upset State Fair officials.

In all we tried eight Taste of the Fair items during our 7½-hour stay and walked off several of those cumulative calories around the fairgrounds and inside the exhibit halls, whose contents we’ll cover in subsequent chapters. I wish we could’ve tried more, but: (a) food in general was pricier than ever, apropos of the economy today; (b) Taste of the Fair items in particular seemed much more expensive, possibly under the assumption that all fair-food fans are wealthy influencers or are just plain irresponsible with their credit cards; (c) the older we get, the less we should be eating, and the less we can eat; and (d) some vendors now approach Taste of the Fair as a chance to create their own Man V. Food super-sized eating challenges suitable only for the mightiest wrestling champions, compiling sandwiches so large that, were I to try one, I wouldn’t be able to eat again for days. And this chapter would look pretty silly with only a single sandwich pic.

So we did what we could in a single day with the bodies allotted. In the past I’ve ranked our results as a gratuitous listicle, but I’m not in the mood to pit vendors against each other. Also included here are a few items Anne threw in that weren’t on that list. She’s willing to play along to an extent, but she has her own tastes and doesn’t share all my compulsions.

Of all the dishes we tried, my favorite was the snack in our lead photo: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cookie Butter Pretzel Bites. That’s also the entire recipe, which could’ve used a catchier name. “The CTCCBPB” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue or work as a hashtag. (“The CinToCruCooButPret Bites”? Nope, forget I tried that.) Wilson Concessions, the pretzel stand next to the Harvest Pavilion’s west end, also won my heart in 2023 with their freshly baked Pepperoni Pizza Pretzel. They’ve knocked it out of the park again — the cookie butter wasn’t cloyingly sweet, and was sticky enough to bond the cereal with the pretzel crust so it didn’t all slide off into the li’l paper boat. The salt level, the crunchy topping, the soft pretzel underbelly — all the textures synced up just right and made the pretzel-bite options at our local AMC Theatres look chintzy.

Of course we needed protein as well…

Last year’s winners, Nitro-Hog BBQ across the street from the Dairy Barn, built another dish around pulled pork, but went a different direction that wasn’t entirely successful. This time the pork was mixed with macaroni-and-cheese and used as an extra-carby nacho topping. It wasn’t served with barbecue sauce, but bottles of mild and hot sauces stood at the condiment station. It might’ve boosted the flavor if I’d gone for hot instead of mild, or if I’d said yes to adding jalapenos, but the main problem is the cheese. Rather than a thicker nacho cheese, they used a cheese that was blander and runnier — much of it seeped down and pooled in the bottom. That reservoir was a tepid dip for the chips at the top, but any below the waterline turned to plaster. The disappointing bottom line: this was Pulled Pork Helper.

Contrast that with their 2024 specialty: the Fried Sugar Biscuit n’ BBQ with Apple Butter Sauce was one of the most amazing dishes of my State Fair lifetime experience, which I already gushed about at the time. Anne loved it so much, she bought one again this year.

As a chaser we picked up another porcine portion over at Twisted Drinks and Food, usually my favorite beverage joint. This year they offered two submissions for TotF: a Peach Tea with peach boba (I’m kinda meh on peach, and Anne does not countenance tea) and a Deep Fried Pork Chop sandwich, another self-descriptive foodstuff. But it isn’t like the Deep-Fried Hostess Treats or Deep-Fried candy bars or other deep-fried standards; it was just a slice of pork, deep-fried and served on a bun — basic and to the point, Ron Swanson style. For what it was, it worked fine. Also, at $8 it was the second-cheapest Taste of the Fair item we tried all day.

The cheapest TotF contestant that caught our eye was also the very first thing we bought that morning: the Key Lime Shake at the Dairy Barn. That longtime establishment beloved by thousands has a spotty track record with us. More than once in years past, we’d get to the fair only to find their special shake had already sold out well in advance. The less said about their specialty grilled cheese sandwiches, the better. For 2025 we hit them up in plenty of time to try the key lime. This was more Anne’s thing than mine, but the lime wasn’t overbearing or sickly sweet. At a comparatively bargain-priced $5.00, it was an easy B+ for the Barn.

When it comes to fairground beverages, though, Anne’s heart lies with other fruits — in this case, a Pineapple Whip from the strawberry-shaped drink stand next to the Harvest Pavilion. (It’s a very happening area, foodie-wise.)

Obviously we needed more sweet treats. After a letdown at a funnel cake stand with new, cool-sounding flavors that would only sell them in three-packs, and a reticence to pay $17 for two (2) curiously dressed egg rolls at another stand, we continued our culinary quest on the north side of the fairgrounds. A stone’s throw from the DNR building was a purveyor of multiple flavors of deep-fried Oreos. Remember when those were brand new and we all had to adjust to them, and now they’re just expected? One stand dares to mix up the formula by adding other ingredients.

All those sound great, right? If you’re obsessed with Taste of the Fair, none of those are on your menu. Instead you get Pickle Fried Oreos.

Yes, I proofread that sentence for typos. Yes, Pickle Fried Oreos. They slap a pickle atop a Golden Oreo (not the original chocolate ones, thank the Lord), batter them together, deep-fry the unholy union, and don’t stop to consider whether they should.

The deep, dark, begrudging truth: they weren’t bad.

It took us a minute to confess that to each other. The pickles were really mild and kept their crunch after cooking. The vat turned the cookies into a filling not too far removed from cream cheese, albeit with about as much sugar as you can find in some salad dressings. Ranch isn’t a go-to for me, but its pairing here didn’t offend. Really, this was more of an appetizer than a true dessert — not something we’d crave, but not the “WHY GOD WHY” self-inflicted punishment we’d feared.

(We appreciate their cashier being patient with our visible reluctance. I’m sure she’d suffered worse reactions from other customers.)

Farther down the same straightaway, next to the giant circus tent was a big alcohol stand run by Urick Concessions, who sold a dish we approached with higher expectations: street corn steak tacos. The sauce mixed with the corn was zesty as promised, complemented well by other components such as cilantro and cotija cheese. The corn/sauce hybrid was the best part of the dish.

Up front we were already taken a bit aback: the pics on the website and the map had shown three tacos, implying this was the purchase size. In reality, we paid $16 and were handed two such mini-tacos. Once we dug in, the meat was unpleasantly chewy — not quite jerky, but nowhere near tender. It reminds me of my early young-adult attempts at cooking meat at home, away from my fast-food job at the time with no Standard Operation Checklist to tell me precisely how many seconds to cook it. We might’ve been happier and saved some stomach space if we’d just scooped the corn/sauce off the top and eaten that with a spoon.

Farther down past the Glass Barn, we tried another sugary treat from the Cavity Factory, who hail from Indy’s south side: a S’Mores cookie. The concept was simple yet elegant: a freshly-baked chocolate chip cookie, topped with a marshmallow (or maybe two mini-marshmallows), which is then hit with just enough fire to glue the marshmallow to the cookie and tinge it with a delicate campfire ash.

Caveat emptor: yes, this was a great cookie, but a modestly sized cookie, less than two inches in diameter…priced at $10 per cookie, nearly the price of two boxes of Girl Scout cookies or a much larger cookie-forward dessert at some of your finer restaurants. Sure, it’s all in the spirit of the State Fair, and it’s the Taste of the Fair, but still: yikes.

From there we skipped two doors down, past the vegan truck, whose new sandwich was on my short list but was regrettably cut because I just didn’t have the room. Our last comestible purchase for ourselves was from another Urick Concessions stand — this time a lighter one, cosmetically speaking: a Cotton Candy Lemon Shake-Up.

Y’know how some bartenders at specialty joints will pour an alcoholic drink into a giant glass, stick several foods on top with skewers that are totally unrelated to the cup’s contents — say, an entire vegetable or a quarter-pound burger or whatever — then sell it to you and try not to giggle when you take a sip with a burger poking you in the face? Or is that only a thing on Food Network shows? Anyway, this was much more manageable and thankfully had none of the liquor. It’s a classic carnival-style lemon shake-up, but with some cotton candy added in the cup and a dollop of it impaled on top. The “cloud” wasn’t freshly spun and felt to my fingertips like a fluffy kind of Play-Doh, but it was equally non-toxic. It amounted to a lemon shake-up heavy on the sugar, but by this point in the afternoon I was probably so dehydrated. It hit the spot and gave me the energy boost I needed to drive us home through rush-hour traffic. That’d do.

…

…okay, so this wasn’t our best year. Again, I wish we’d had more time or 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. On rare occasion we’ll try to fit in a second day at the fair, but we have a comic-con coming up next weekend and other happenings later in August. This, I’m afraid, is it for our fair-food munchies for the year unless I can convince my boss to send me on a paid field trip as an encore.

But this isn’t all we saw at the fair. To be continued!

Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 2: The Soundtrack of Summer
Part 3: The Year in Food, “Look But Don’t Taste” Division
Part 4: The Year in Lego
Part 5: The Year in Art
Part 6: The Year in Antiques
Part 7: Outtakes and More!