21st Most Favorite Thing About the State Fair of Texas: Chicken Fried Bacon

I have yet to understand it, but after years of self-examination, I’ve learned that passing through the gates of the Fair somehow changes people. Individuals who would normally keep a two-mile demilitarized zone between themselves and a fried food find that their body’s chemical composition has suddenly metamorphosed and they crave that crunchtastic, salterrific, goldenlicious crust of magnificence in exactly the same way that addicts need coffee first thing in the morning. Those who usually can’t help but order everything (in the real world) skinless, oil-less, butter-less, and grilled, suddenly turn into devil-may-care sugar and grease omnivores at the Fair, racing with wild eyes from one buffet of dietary decrepitude to the next.

You’ve got to hand it to the State Fair for creating a safe haven for people who simply need one day a year to fall off the healthy living wagon, roll happily down streets paved with chocolate, and come to a stop in a ditch filled with a spectrum of stuff boasting immeasurable calorie counts (numbers start to get fuzzy for me after a billion). Foods that would be shunned if they happened to mistakenly find themselves wandering around in regular society are celebrated at the Fair, gobbled with gusto by those who would normally lay claim to more refined palates and expertly-developed willpower.

At the Fair, you see, gluttony rules. If you’ve somehow made it inside Fair Park and still feel beholden to some kind of calorie-and fat-deficient diet, you might as well go home. There is nothing for you here.

Which brings us to today’s Countdown pick. Prior to 2008, I would have had a tough time summing up, in the form of one item, the general attitude of glorious health-food snubbing that pervades the entirety of the Fair. Last year, however, a fried product was unveiled that so thoroughly flies in the face of every possible scenario for long-term, arterially-unclogged living that, for me anyway, it came to symbolize the delightful, wonderful excess that is our State Fair.

That item is chicken fried bacon.
Only inside the gates of the Fair could an already-fried piece of pork be fried again, served with a side of ranch dressing, and presented to paying guests as food. This would never happen in your home, or at a restaurant. But the Fair is an alternate reality, a Twilight Zone, a Bizarro World in which everything is upside-down. Goats wear costumes and use turtles for transport, soft drinks can be eaten with a fork, the fattest pig wins a blue ribbon, and shoes are fashioned into award-winning art (more on that later). Somehow, in such a world, chicken fried bacon (and this year’s banner item – deep fried butter) makes EVERY BIT of sense.

As does the fact that even though it looks like fried sole-of-shoe, twice-fried pork is rather tasty.

Fried Bacon Photo Courtesy of Clare.

~ by nf1014 on September 4, 2009.