Minnesota State Fair 2015:
Up for breakfast? These Berry Pop Rocks French Toast will start your morning off with a blast! More specifically, the tender French toast is dressed up in double berry raspberry and strawberry sauces, dons a dollop of real whipped cream, and glistens with a glimmer of Pop Rocks.
Meanwhile, in meatloaf land, we have Meatloaf Hash, featuring thick chunks of sauteed potatoes, peppers, and onions all topped with scrambled eggs and tangy bernaise sauce.
Smokey’s Breakfast Burger consists of seasoned sausage and hamburger meat offered up alongside applewood-smoked bacon, caramelized onions, melted provolone cheese, a fried egg, and (in an honorable nod to health) a slice of tomato on a corn-dusted bun.
The Minnesota Wild Rice Benedict Muffin uses a muffin cup made from wild rice and tops it with sliced ham and a soft-cooked egg, all smothered in hollandaise sauce.
Minnesota BEE-NICE Gluten-Free Muffin features Minnesota-grown, bee-friendly blueberries, sweet corn, and honey, spiced up with a hint of chipotle.
Minnesota State Fair 2015: (continued)
The theme for the fair that year was Sriracha. It came in the form of Sriracha Balls, featuring a mystery mix of meat and mush of which the only discernible thing was a piece of corn…
…and a hot dog, with Sriracha Dog on a Sriracha cream cheese-coated bun, an odd combination and “waste of a good hot dog.”
Sausage Sister’s Sriracha Sliders, featuring Great Balls of Fire meatballs with Monterey Jack cheese in the middle and offered with the sisters’ sweet ‘n’ hot sriracha sauce.
Sriracha slaw–officially named Island Slaw–is coleslaw mixed with pineapple, mandarin oranges, sugar snap peas, spinach, and teriyaki chicken, all in a Sriracha glaze.
Sriracha Ice Cream. This Fire and Ice Kream did indeed top vanilla soft serve with Sriracha and corn chip crunch.
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The Sriracha-optional Sweet Potato Taco involves mashed sweet potatoes, black beans, sauteed onions, and vinegar colesaw and serving it up in a flour tortilla.
Shanghaied Henri’s International Tacos offers up several varieties of note. The St. Paul Taco braises beef brisket in Summit Villain beer and comes with caramelized onions, cabbage slaw, horseradish sour cream, and apple-smoked bacon bits. The Yucatan braises chicken chorizo in tequila and red wine vinegar, and the meat’s offered with green cabbage carrot slaw, queso fresco, pickled red onions, and cilantro sour cream. And the Oslo Taco features seared and braised peppercorn-rubbed pork, Nowegian Jarlsburg cheese, pickled cabbage coleslaw, apple-smoked bacon, lingonberry relish, sour cream, and onions that’s topped with pork cracklings. Unfortunately, “the combination of flavors and textures so created evoked a train full of toxic waste, driven by a drunken, suicidal maniac into a poorly-maintained nuclear power plant.”
Wine-Fried Kalettes are a curiosity. They’re battered kale fried in wine and offered up with a sweet Thai chili sauce that may or may not have hit the Hipster hat trick by being Sriracha in disguise.
The Spam Burger comes in five flavors, as you see here, but it’s all sliced canned meat that’s supposed to be–but wasn’t always–grilled.
Hot Tail, a roasted pig’s tail in scallion ginger sauce, is “really tasty but crazy fatty,” although it would give you “lifelong bragging rights for having eaten a pig’s tail.”
Walleye Stuffed Mushroom, brought to you by Giggles’ Campire Grill, takes giant mushroom caps and stuffs them with walley, three types of cheese, even more (cream) cheese, red peppers, panko breadcrumbs, and a special sauce. And yeah, that’d be Maple Bacon Beer on the side.
Deep-Fried Ribs are pretty much what they sound like: Smoked baby back ribs, breaded, deep fried, and offered with BBQ sauce on the side for dippin’.
Prime Rib to Go stuffs a soft bread cone with thinly-sliced prime rib, sauteed peppers, onions, and mushrooms. It comes with a side of au jus, horseradish, or Parmesan garlic sauce.
Also in the “portable potables” category, we have Limerick Stix, which are deep-fried sticks of pimento cheese. Not sure what the custom dipping sauce is precisely, but there are not always ingredients list at the State Fair.
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Indi Frites take traditional fries and lovingly coat them with cumin, coriander, and cardamom, then dunk them in batter and deep fry them to seal in the flavor. “A fry experience of a lifetime.”
This Grilled Venetian-Style Pizza tops a soft, flatbread-like crust with giant chunks of tomato and barely a sprinkle of cheese, making it “almost the polar opposite of the greasy cheesebomb pizza we’ve gotten used to at the fair.”
Not quite the pizza you hoped it’d be, the Steak Apizzaiola takes cuts of Italian steak sauteed in au jus and served up with caramelized onions, melted cheese, and marinara sauce on a seasoned kaiser bun.
The Up Nort Shoreman’s Lunch serves up battered northern pike, deep fried, and served alongside fresh tomato sauce, potatoes, and corn with a smoked pepper tartar sauce.
“Fitting that the fastest line in the Food Building was of sliders made from the fastest bird on the planet,” writes one reviewer. Guess that means they weren’t too popular, eh?
Stuffed Italian Meatloaf on a Stick, though, does tell you what it’s stuffed with: Mozzarella and pepperoni. What it doesn’t say, though, is that there’s an army of pepperoni lined up beneath the cloak of marinara and Parmesan. It also doesn’t hint at just how delicious it is!
Also on a stick, we have Frosted Flakes Cereal-Coated Chicken on a Stick.
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Tikka on a Stikka features “transcendental tomato cream sauce” and so good that “strip away the stick and this is high-class eating.”
Another nifty named dish, Cowboy Dave’s Cluck & Moo piles smashed potatoes with roasted beef, grilled chicken, and crispy onions, smotheirng it all with gravy and mustard BBQ sauce.
Salad Named Soo tastes as good as the song that inspired its name, with cubed watermelon, argula, basil, mint, and almonds in a chili honey lime dressing.
Starting our “mixup” menu, we have the Pretzel Croissant Sandwich. The “[s]alty, squishy, and seductive” sandwich layers grilled chicken breast and ham with Swiss cheese and spinach, garnished with honey mustard and chive aioli and served atop a pretzel croissant so good it “will have you looking askance at the regular old croissant from here on.”
Totchos take the titular tots and top them with cheddar cheese sauce, seasoned sour cream, bacon bits, and green onions, plus chicken or ground beef upon request.
The Burger Dog forms an oblong from a mix of ground beef, hot dog, bacon, cheese, and jalapeños and serves it up on a hot dog bun. Despite the name, it was “[n]ot so much burger meets hot dog as bacon meets cheddarwurst,” but still delectable.
Similarly, Buffalo’d Bones takes slow-smoked, center-cut, St. Louis-style spare ribs, debones and fries them, tosses them in buffalo sauce, and serves them up like a hot dog with blue cheese dressing and celery. Not sure about those as garnish or the use of buffalo over BBQ sauce, but apparently it was so bad one reviewer “almost wished for more bones as…a reprieve from the copious, gelatinous fat clinging steadfastly to any semblance of actual meat.”
Kimchi ‘n’ Curry Poutine smothers the standard fries with braised pork, curry gravy, and cheddar cheese before topping all that with kimchi and a poached egg.
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In “things that look like a dessert but aren’t” category, we have this Mac ‘n’ Cheese Cupcake! It’s a breadcrumb crust filled with thick, creamy mac and cheese, topped with more breadcrumbs, baked, and frosted with Cheez Whiz.
Meanwhile, in mirror land, there’s Italian Dessert Nachos, made from cinnamon sugar cannoli chips coated in sweet ricotta cheese and topped with either fresh fruit–pictured here with strawberries, blueberries, and lemon curd–or bacon, chocolate chips, and Nutella.
Salted Caramel Puff Sundae spruces up a cup of vanilla soft serve with delicate Old Dutch caramel puffs and thick layers of caramel sauce.
A little less likable in the ice cream realm, the Raw Jalapeño Chocolate Ice Cream had solid frozen chunks of the peppers.
Also in the “ick” category, BBQ Pickled Ice Cream coupled “grainy soft-serve ice cream” with “disconcerting chunks” that were “[n]either BBQ, nor pickle, nor ice cream.”
There’s nothing more Minnesota than a salad that isn’t really a salad, and Grandma Deb’s Snicker Bar Salad takes this right in stride. It’s a mix of chopped Snickers bars and Granny Smith apples tossed in vanilla pudding and topped with whipped cream and caramel sauce. In this case though, the photo’s misleading: The dish “was almost all pudding.”
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Sara’s Tipsy Pies’ Rhubarb Blue Hunny Do incorporates the melon-flavored Hunny Do Wheat Beer, a Minnesota craft beer, into the pie filling of a blend of fresh strawberries, baby blueberries, and rhubarb. The pies are topped with a Hunny Do Tipsy Topping. Other options include Irish (Whiskey) Apple, Salted Caramel, and Maple Bacon Apple.
Chilled Bread Pudding is the custardy dessert that’s baked before being served chilled with a warm glaze and choice of Moon Gravel condiments. All in all, there are 64 potential flavor combinations. One reviewer found it “a little unnerving to see your bread pudding scooped out of an ice cream bucket in one solid sphere,” but she found the combination of sweet corn bread, caramel sauce, and rum-soaked raisins was “[s]urprisingly adult.” Another reviewer raved about her combination: challah, salted caramel sauce, and granola.
Sometimes simple is better, like this Maple Bacon Funnel Cake.
Or this Butter Queen Coffee Ice Cream.
And this Dark Chocolate Key Lime Bar. Because everything tastes better when served dipped in chocolate and on a stick.
The classic cannoli from Mancini’s was “so fresh they may as well have been the first daisies of spring: Light, airy, pure as sunbeams.”
The Doo Wop Dip crams strawberry ice cream–made with real, fresh berries!–into a croissant before dipping it in chocolate and drizzling over some white chocolate for garnish.
This Hawaiian Sunrise Shave Ice claims to feature passion fruit, guava, and mango, but “all it tasted of was sugar, ice, sugar, [and] food coloring.”
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