Somewhere in Dallas, Texas, there is a panel of judges. They are seated. They are serious. And they are about to decide, by formal vote, whether this year’s most creative deep-fried food is the one filled with molten butter, the one that tastes like a cola, or the one that is somehow — impossibly, structurally — still beer on the inside.
This is the Big Tex Choice Awards, the official food competition of the State Fair of Texas, and it has been crowning deep-fried inventions every year since 2005. It is not a bit. It is not a viral stunt. There are entry rules and finalists and categories and winners, and people build their entire year around it. 🍳
It’s a real competition, with real categories
Here’s the part that delights me most: this thing has structure. It isn’t a free-for-all where somebody wanders in with a fried lawn chair. Vendors enter, finalists are named, and judges pick winners in defined categories — currently Best Taste–Savory, Best Taste–Sweet, Most Creative, and a category devoted entirely to drinks, adorably named the Sipper.
Think about what that means. Somebody sat in a meeting and said, “our fried-food competition needs a beverage division,” and everybody else nodded, and now it exists. There is a governance structure for deep-frying. I love it here.
Fried Coke: the one that started the arms race 🥤
In 2006, a Dallas man named Abel Gonzales Jr. — a database analyst by day, later nicknamed “Fried Jesus” by an unusually generous local press — took home Most Creative for Fried Coke.
Now, you cannot deep-fry a liquid directly; the physics simply decline. So Gonzales did the clever thing: he made a cola-flavored batter, fried it into little golden balls, then drenched the finished balls in Coca-Cola syrup, whipped cream, cinnamon sugar, and a cherry. The idea of Coke, delivered by a doughnut.
It went off like a firework. Reports at the time put it at 10,000 cups sold in the first two weeks, and within a year it was showing up at dozens of other state fairs around the country. One guy’s side project became a national fair food.
Fried Beer: the one that shouldn’t work 🍺
Then, in 2010, came the entry that sounds like a dare and turned out to be an engineering problem: Fried Beer™. (Trademarked. Of course it’s trademarked.)
The solve is genuinely elegant. You take pretzel dough, form it into little sealed pockets, and fill each one with beer. Then you drop them in the fryer for just long enough — and only just long enough — that the dough cooks through while the beer inside stays sealed and liquid. You bite into a warm pretzel pocket and it releases a small mouthful of actual beer.
It won Most Creative that year, and honestly? Deserved. The dough is doing structural work. The timing is doing chemistry. It’s a tiny edible pressure vessel and someone invented it for a county fair.
Fried butter: the honest asterisk 🧈
Deep-fried butter is real. It’s a genuine State Fair of Texas item, also from Abel Gonzales Jr.’s workshop of controlled dairy chaos. You freeze the butter, batter it, and fry it fast, so that the shell sets golden while the inside relaxes into a puddle of pure, molten, uncomplicated butter. That’s the hero photo up top. That’s what’s going on in there.
What I’m not going to tell you is which year it won, because when I went looking, the sources disagreed with each other — and a fried-food award year is a very silly thing to be wrong about in public. So: fried butter is a real and beloved thing that a real person invented and real people happily line up for. On the trophy question, I’m going to let the fair speak for itself. 🧈
Where the whole thing began 🍌
The very first Big Tex Choice Awards, in 2005, gave us two winners that tell you everything about the spirit of this competition:
- Fried Peanut Butter, Jelly & Banana Sandwich — an Elvis order, submerged.
- Viva Las Vegas Fried Ice Cream — ice cream. Deep-fried. On purpose. Successfully.
From there it just kept escalating, year over year, one delighted maniac at a time, until we arrived at a world containing sealed pretzel pouches of hot beer.
Why this is on a good-news blog
Because it would have been so easy for this to be cynical. A fried-food contest could be pure spectacle — shock value, a photo, a shrug.
Instead, look at what people actually did with it. Somebody worked out the batter chemistry to make a liquid taste like a soda. Somebody engineered a dough vessel that holds beer through a deep fryer. Somebody froze butter to precisely the right hardness so it would survive the trip. These are real problems, solved with real skill, entirely in the service of making strangers at a fair go “no way” and then “okay, actually, that’s incredible.”
That’s the thing about the deep-fry Olympics. It looks like an excuse to be ridiculous. It’s really an excuse to be inventive — and then to hand the results to someone on a paper plate and watch their face. 🍳💛
Got a gloriously unhinged snack from your corner of the world? Sign the guestbook and tell us. Catch up on the series any time: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4. 🍿
