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 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.

This year’s Taste of the Fair dishes and drinks number a staggering 46 in all, a 50+% jump over last year’s assortment. We tried 10 of them across our 7½-hour stayand walked off several of those cumulative calories around the fairgrounds and the exhibit halls, whose contents we’ll cover in subsequent chapters. I was tempted to rank these in a gratuitous listicle, but I’m not in the mood to pit vendors against each other and right now cannot think hard about any of this because I am so exhausted. To keep things simple, everything’s presented in our purchasing order from 9:40 a.m. to 4:45 EDT.

1. Fried Sugar Biscuit n’ BBQ with Apple Butter Sauce. As it happens, our very first snack of the morning was also our favorite food of the day. The good folks at Nitro-Hog BBQ, who rocked us last year with their Buffalo Pork-‘n’-Mac, came back harder with the sandwich in our lead photo. The biscuit is fried fresh, rolled in sugar, split and topped with pulled pork marinated in an apple butter barbecue sauce. Remember that scene in Ratatouille when a single perfect bite sends food critic Peter O’Toole into a childhood flashback? Same thing happened to me here — that sauce unearthed warm memories of my grandma’s homemade apple butter, one of the best things she ever made. Couple that with generously portioned, expertly cooked pork, and the mind reels how far we’ve evolved beyond the primitive era of the donut burger.

2. Fried Ice Cream. To Gen-X Hoosiers the Platonic ideal of fried ice cream was achieved in the ’80s at Chi-Chi’s, the only other Mexican chain anyone talked about at the time besides Taco Bell. Fried ice cream was their best item, but wasn’t a sustainable business model in itself. All attempts at fried ice cream ever after have had to compete unfairly with its ghost. This one’s made with a cornflake breading that’s barely visible through all the standard sundae toppings, the one component that ought to make this rise above standard-sundaeness. Once I pickaxed through the layers to extract that breading, it sadly tasted like untreated cornmeal. I’ve had some great desserts made with cornmeal (or corn!), but this pales next to those, to say nothing of Chi-Chi’s.

3. Indiana Pork Riblets. Anne forwent her annual boneless pork sandwich tradition to try a slightly different take from the Indiana Pork Producers. I acknowledge the greatness of the tender, impeccably delectable meat in this amuse-bouche (though Anne likes bone-in meats more than I do; she’s okay with foods designed as only half-edible), but the listing said this would come with three sauces. We were handed a box of meat with zero sauces in it. When we went back and asked, they congenially pointed to three pans of cupped sauces behind the counter and asked us which one we wanted. So I can tell you their Citrus Explosion (more of a jus than a sauce) paired nicely with the pork; you’ll have to ask somebody else about the other two sauces. Technically this assignment goes down as Incomplete in our mental gradebooks.

4. Strawberry Cheesecake Funnel Cake. Another divisive dish in our relationship: I’m rather keen on elephant ears and funnel cakes, but Anne believes funnel cakes are inferior knockoffs to be shunned. While she chatted for a few minutes with another, older lady who was super hyped about her own Taste of the Fair walkabout, I was left to tackle this one solo. The cheesecake sauce was a fun change of pace for that funnel-cake foundation, but the strawberry sauce was cloyingly sweet, soaked through the cake’s center and left it a soggy turnoff I couldn’t finish.

5. Tropical Daze Float. Still taking a break from her fair staples, Anne set her beloved lemon shake-ups aside in favor of a float comprising soft-serve pineapple ice cream in orange carbonated soda. On a whim she paid extra for a souvenir cup that she could bring back for refills, though not free ones.

The ice cream was fine, but I demurred and let Anne hoard the bulk of it because I can’t stand fruit-flavored soft drinks. Well, except Diet Mountain Dew, which tastes less like fruit and more like an agreeable yet undefinable food-science lab accident.

6. Chocolate Duck Fries. A rare instance of a Taste of the Fair vendor located on the grounds of the Midway (where the fair keeps all their rides), the duck fries stand had three TotF listings, all of them variations on fries cooked in duck fat: plain, poutine, or chocolate. Intrepid reporters from our local newspaper tried a dozen TotF dishes and declared the chocolate fries their winner, so we followed their recommendation.

IndyStar nailed it: if you’ve ever tried and enjoyed chocolate-covered potato chips, these are the next superior rung up the potato-side-dish evolutionary ladder. Freshly fried, salted, then drizzled with white and dark chocolate, they’re an addictive dose of salty-sweet harmony. Anne and I were back in accord and split this almost evenly. As rankings might go, these were first runner-up to that winning Fried Sugar Biscuit. Pair the two dishes for a decadent Extra Value Meal!

7. Jerk Chicken Nachos. Jamaican Breeze Sports Bar & Grill, a brick-‘n’-mortar eatery only a mile-‘n’-a-half east of the fairgrounds, brought their own food truck through the gates and brought a welcome alternative to the farm-fare majority. The ordinary chips were but a vehicle for Jamaican jerk chicken, though the meat and whatever seasonings were outnumbered by the diced peppers, onions, and tomatoes. We appreciated how it wasn’t all drowning in nacho cheese, but I expected spicier. Regardless, our bodies desperately needed something besides meat and sugar, and Veggie Dish #2 fit that need.

8. Happy Jack. Black Leaf Vegan’s food truck has spent the past few years claiming a space as another, comparatively more radical, anti-carnivorous counterpoint to The Usual. After my previous hemming and hawing, I dove in and experimented with a sandwich cleverly disguised as pulled pork. Behind a mask of maple bourbon barbecue sauce is an ample serving of shredded jackfruit magically transmogrified into a credible substitute with a meaty texture and much higher spice level than the previous jerk-chicken morsels. The chips on the side were inoffensive filler, and I tossed aside the bun’s crown, which was allegedly a pretzel bun according to the TotF listing, but seemed a rather non-pretzel substitute bun — a dull one at that, vegan or not.

9. Cookie Butter Elephant Ear. Anne finally got her elephant ear as a rebuttal to my earlier funnel cake, and thus was balance brought to the Force…for the first few bites. It’s your classic elephant ear with cinnamon sugar, but they also spread cookie butter all over it and sprinkle crushed biscotti cookies all over that. What sounds on paper like a confluence of nifty sweet treats equated in reality to “basic cookies and basic cookie batter on basic elephant ear” — three stacked planes of plainness, a trio of textures within an extremely narrow flavor-profile range. If sweetness is all you want from a dessert, here’s loads of some, extra goopy.

10. Shark Attack. The good citizens at Twisted Drinks consistently make my favorite fruit drinks at the fair (non-carbonated! my favorite!), but weren’t targeting my demographic with their latest concoction. For a slight variant on their great fruit punch, which they freshly squeeze and mix to order, they throw in a school of Albanese brand Gummi Sharks. It’s not just a refreshing summertime drink to stave off dehydration: now it looks like you’re carrying around a tiny pool where sharks have shredded all the human sunbathers they could reach and now there’s blood everywhere! It’s a fun, violent diorama! If you can make out the shark shapes in all that murk! Gummis are not my thing, but that fruit punch totally is; I chugged it in 90 seconds flat and threw the rest away, to punish the pretend-sharks for their imaginary crimes. I like to think somewhere out there is a Gummi Chief Brody who’d approve.

…

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 very special miniseries:

Part 2: Let’s Pretend We’re Influencers
Part 3: Where the Art Museum Meets the Chainsaw
Part 4: Land of the Glowing Giants
Part 5: Food for Displaying, Not Devouring
Part 6: The Year in Lego
Part 7: The Year in Antiques
Part 8: The Year in Art
Part 9: The Rest of Our Day