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 numbered 39 in all. We sampled twelve such items during our 7-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. Prices ranged from $9 to $15, comparable to the average AMC concession stand. The high prices hadn’t improved over last year, but we mitigated the budgetary strain with funds leftover from last weekend’s Fan Expo Chicago that we reallocated here. I wish we could’ve tried more, but we only attended a single day. I’m told the older we get, the less we should be eating, and the less we can eat.

Last year I shared everything we tried in random order. This year we’re back to ranking them against each other just because I’m awake enough to do it tonight, plus I’m annoyed with so many letdowns here. I won’t be surprised if my extended sugar rush runs out before I finish. I’ve divided our results into two separate lists — nine foods and three drinks. Pitting foods against drinks just felt weird. We’ll start with the grub.

9. Deep Fried Lindor Dubai Chocolate Truffles. This was the corn-dog-shaped serving in our lead photo. Batter-fried snack foods can be the best, but not all ideas can achieve the Deep-Fried Oreos platonic ideal. Dubai chocolate might be one of today’s hot fads among some foodies, but the fryers showed Lindor’s tiny, sugary musket balls no mercy. Anne took the first bite; in retaliation, the liquefied truffles spewed out at her, dribbled on her nice holiday shirt, and flooded the dish. That micro-eruption left us with an empty corn dog husk that’d gotten soggy from the inside. Exact same thing happened to us years ago when we tried deep-fried butter once. ONCE.

Speaking of butter…

8. Butter Dipped Ice Cream Cone. Soft-serve ice cream dipped in hardened chocolate was a scrumptious treat for anyone who ever grew up near a Dairy Queen like I did. Some mad food scientist has invented a new kind of ice cream casing: hardened butter! I love the occasional salty/sweet snacks for their contrast and the way they capture The Duality of Man, but…butter? Like, just butter? There’s a difference between eating the butter pats that came with our school lunches (or was that just me?) and eating a crust made of just butter, as if someone tried to bake a flaky pie crust but a computer glitch deleted the rest of the recipe after the first line.

7. Chile Lime Smoked Chicken Leg. We knew we’d need at least a few protein dishes to balance out the sugar smorgasbord. Smoked meats are awesome when treated properly, or well accessorized — in this case, a perky avocado sauce I’d buy in a small jar if I could. Too bad the sauce drowned out all other seasonings, including the “chile” and “lime” selling points. The sauce also didn’t mask the lukewarm dryness of my drumstick. It didn’t help that the cashier failed at communication and they lost Anne’s order for several minutes until someone in charge finally turned around and wondered why she wasn’t going anywhere.

6. Charlie’s Mexican Street Corn Pizza. A tentative first developmental step toward some future entrepreneur creating an eatery called Pizzeria Elotes, this cheesy corn pizza was inoffensive in every sense — texture and flavor were just-okay, not exactly a challenge to the corn-on-the-cob vendors. The lime was a welcome garnish, but the spice level was zero despite the visible tajin flecks. Anne generally avoids spicy foods, so if she’s complaining that your food isn’t spicy enough, it’s possible some practical joker filled your shakers with sawdust.

5. Junkyard Spam Dog. As if “hot dog made of Spam” weren’t daring enough, this normal-sized wiener is loaded with coleslaw, macaroni and cheese, potato chips, barbecue sauce, and sliced jalapeños. After I discarded the peppers (I have to be in the mood), the coleslaw effectively swallowed all the other toppings. And yet I could totally taste the Spam, because nothing stops Spam from being Spam and marching through all other ingredients like the military meat it is.

4. The S’Mork. This year’s official Taste of the Fair Winner — announced early this very morning before our arrival — is the latest brainstorm from Nitro Hog BBQ, the geniuses behind 2024’s TotF-winning Fried Sugar Biscuit n’ BBQ with Apple Butter Sauce, which is literally The Greatest Taste of the Fair Dish in World History. This year they stuck with their potent salty/sweet foundation — the freshly fried biscuit with sugar coating, their trademark smoked pork, and the optional barbecue sauce — and easily recaptured the glory…except then they went and added a goopy La Brea pile of melting marshmallows and chocolate chips. That lipstick wasn’t quite the right shade for this expertly prepped pig. Making things worse: our plastic forks kept tearing at the flimsy foil under the sandwich and stirring shreds of it into the meat.

3. Strawberry Shortcake. That’s the name on the list, but the menu also called it Strawberry Delight. Anne’s favorite dessert of the day was also the heaviest thing we bought, even outweighing the proteins. Two scoops of ice cream and whipped cream atop, like, two or three pounds of syrupy strawberries with some kind of starchy discs submerged below — shortbread? biscuit? hardtack? — that proved a nifty little treasure-chest of texture once they were unearthed and brought to the surface. The syrup was a little rich for my taste (and I was beyond stuffed by this time), so Anne ate most of it herself. Frankly, I can’t believe she even fell asleep tonight.

2. Soul Train Egg Rolls. Now here’s the spice I was looking for: tightly packed dollops of jerk chicken, Caribbean spiced cabbage, rice and cheese in a crunchy shell and served with an optional packet of Thai chili sauce. The spices exceeded Anne’s tolerance threshold, but great things intertwined for me in these small packages.

1. Vegan HomeRun Sliders. The good folks at Black Leaf Vegan have been offering an alternative to the fair’s traditional farm-animal dominance for at least a good five years or more, but I’ve often failed to reach their faraway northeast-corner spot with any appetite left. This year I made sure to save room and didn’t regret it: I quickly devoured this trio of plant-based patties on faux White Castle buns, topped with slaw, red onions, pickles, some sort of bacon bits (soy?) and copious cheddar sauce (vegan, I assume?). Maybe it made a huge difference that the patties were freshly cooked (though I ended up patiently waiting so long that they apologized and threw in a courtesy drink), but they pulled off a hat trick of perfectly balanced hits of flavor, crunch, and food-group variety. This was the precision creativity we’d hoped to find.

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…as for the three drinks:

3. Great American Shake. Anne was bound and determined to celebrate the American semiquincentennial cheerfully somewhere in this country in 2026, and the fair did not disappoint her. This extra-large dessert was nothing too fancy, and designed more for looks than complexity — they drizzled red and blue syrups into the glass, filled it with a vanilla shake mixed on the spot (not in a broken McDonald’s shake machine) and capped with whipped cream and a tiny flag. It’s worthy competition to the Dairy Barn across the street, though Anne couldn’t tell what kinds of syrups those were and thinks “red” and “blue” might have also been their flavors.

2. Strawberry Pineapple Twister. The Twisted Drinks stand outside the Indiana Arts Building is always my last stop before we leave the fairgrounds for the day. They were frazzled and running behind today, but eventually I got my refresher for the rush-hour drive home, filled with chunks of actual strawberry and pineapple. For a change of pace, they offered Splenda instead of sugar — not my favorite artificial sweetener, but the antidote I needed to the rest of the day’s excess.

1. Raspberry Sweet Tea Slushie. I’ve never seen all those words in the same clause before. Maybe it was the dehydration talking, or maybe the melange was just that addictive, but with every sip I wanted more more more now now now.

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…and that’s it for us this year. The State Fair runs through August 23rd, so if you’re reading this early enough and you’re free to head there this weekend, check out the Taste of the Fair master list and form your own action plan. You might love the other options we skipped — say, the numerous alcohol variants, or any dish definable as “the same staple we’ve been selling for decades, but we put a new hat on it.” Your Mileage May Vary.

To be continued!