by Holly Hughes
If you have never deep-fried anything in your life, you may be thinking at this point, “How hard can it be?” Anyone can stick food in a fryer. But consider: It took the Fletcher brothers sixty attempts to produce a batter that tasted good and stayed on the weenie. Mastering the science of frying requires know-how, but to go further and create a memorable state fair food, one has to have an artist’s inspiration. The right balance must be struck between novelty and flavor.
No wonder then that secrecy abounds. Participants contacted for this article were evasive about their future endeavors. Ideas like fried jelly beans and fried Pop Rocks do not fall from the sky, and they can be quickly appropriated. “Other fairs are following our lead,” Erpillo explained. “Last year I won Best Taste for Fernie’s Deep-fried Peaches and Cream on September 7. The Texas fair didn’t open until September twenty-something, but Oklahoma or Kansas was having a fair September 11 and somebody was already knocking us off.” That the R&D can be brutal, burning eyes and skin, only adds to the sense of ownership. Glen Kusak won Best Taste in 2008 for chicken-fried bacon. “We had tried an item that contained a hot dog,” he told me. “The wiener exploded, and it became ugly pretty quick.”
One does have to wonder, however, where the line should be drawn. Milton Whitley, a high school teacher who has been a concessionaire at the state fair for twenty years, told me recently that he had battered and deep-fried mud. “We had it,” he said. “I’ll be honest.” He wanted to change the subject, but I pressed him for details. He continued to dodge. I wondered if he was pulling my leg, until I became aware that he had an entirely different reason for hesitating. “I’m going to get myself in trouble for bringing that up,” he said. “I think that’s my ace in the hole this year.”
How rare is the moment when the person who is drifting is overcome with a sense of purpose? The sudden obsession could be anything—hairstyling, doll manufacturing, bass fishing. One morning he wakes up and says, “That’s what I need to do.” This is possibly the most important milestone in anyone’s life, but it sometimes takes years for the revelation—if it happens at all. Like many offspring of restaurateurs, Gonzales first entered the family business as an unenthusiastic dishwasher, in his case as punishment for bad behavior and bad grades. “The first time I worked in the restaurant I couldn’t even reach the sink to wash dishes—I remember that,” he said. “It was really embarrassing, because everybody knew why I was there: I was in trouble.” In time, he graduated to prep chef, then cook, then manager. But the 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week responsibility of a restaurant was not appealing. “I am way too lazy for anything like that,” he said. Instead, when he was in his early twenties, he followed the gravitational pull of the nineties dot-com boom and landed a job at a direct-mail marketing company. He started off in the warehouse, driving around pallets of paper. Later, he became a machine operator, and eventually he worked his way up to programmer and database analyst, a position he held for more than a decade.
This profession, he discovered, was only slightly better than washing dishes. “It was very boring. I was behind a desk in a cube,” he said. “I would write programs all day long and surf the Net and talk on the phone and take lunches—really nine-to-five, like the movie Office Space. We had Hawaiian shirt day, casual Fridays, happy hour.” He’s able to laugh about it for about as long as it takes to spit the sentences out, then he’d rather move on. “That was a rough time in my life,” he said.
It was in 1999, after losing $20 or $30 on a ring-toss game at the fair, that the notion of actually working there dawned on him. “Gah! That guy is making a fortune just three weeks out of the year doing a goofy little bottle trick!” he said. Gonzales looked into operating a game booth at the fair and discovered that one company ran all the stands. So he tried another angle: concessions.
Three years later he opened his first booth, serving a giant sopaipilla in the shape of Texas, covered in honey, cinnamon, whipped cream, and strawberries. It was an idea adapted from his father’s restaurant, but he used bread dough instead of sopaipilla dough for a more buttery flavor. The reaction was mild. He had to drag customers off the midway like a carnival barker. But even if his initial few seasons at the fair were difficult (his first year he actually lost money), he still dreaded going back to his nine-to-five gig. “I remember the first year, we ended on a Sunday and we were there until three in the morning,” he said. “I was up at seven and was at work at eight. It was terrible. That first week back to work from the fair was awful.”
For a few years he carried on a kind of double life as an office worker and a concessionaire. Gonzales was still living at his parents’ house, even though his parents had moved out in 2000. (“It’s really, really strange,” he says. “I just never left.”) Then, in 2005, Gonzales returned from a month-long vacation in Egypt and saw in his pile of mail an envelope from the fair. The announcement within stated the rules for the Big Tex competition, as well as a theme: Elvis. “That made me think right away: peanut butter, banana, and jelly sandwich,” he said. Though the deadline had passed, he immediately called the head office and begged them to take a late entry. They did. A day later, he dusted off his home fryer from Target and started to experiment. The product that resulted from his trials was simple and delicious: a standard PB&J sandwich with banana, battered, fried, quartered, and served dusted with powdered sugar. It won the 2005 award for Best Taste.
Each subsequent year, Gonzales tried to outdo himself. In 2006 he won Most Creative for Deep-fried Coke (“Smooth spheres of Coca-Cola-flavored batter are deep-fried, drizzled with pure Coke fountain syrup, topped with whipped cream, cinnamon, sugar, and a cherry” read the fair guide). In 2007 he won Best Taste for Texas Fried Cookie Dough. This was followed by the deep-fried pineapple ring topped with the frozen banana-flavored whipped cream (the only entry of Gonzales’s not to win an award). By the end of 2008, he thought the attention had peaked. “I had been on ABC. I had done interviews in Australia and Argentina,” he said. “I was taking stock of everything and I was going, ‘That was a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I’m never gonna have that again.’”
Oh, how wrong he was. In 2009 he figured out a way to deepfry a pat of butter. The concept alone was going to attract people; he knew that. But he had no idea how it would take off: Though it has a long way to go to catch up with the corny dog, fried butter can now be found at fairs around the country. “It’s just amazing,” he said. “One night a friend called me up and said, ‘You’re on Letterman’s Top Ten,’ and I was like, ‘No frickin’ way!’” (The late-night comedian deadpanned, “This is why the rest of the world hates us,” before launching into his “Top Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Eating Fried Butter.”) The money was good, but the real payoff was something unexpected for a concessionaire: fame. “I mean, all of a sudden TV programs like Oprah come to your booth and you’re a star,” he said. “For those three weeks, you’re it.”
At age forty, Abel Gonzales discovered that he had a gift. It wasn’t necessarily deep-frying. It was dreaming up bizarre concepts. “Did you ever watch The Honeymooners?” he asked me. “The whole show revolves around this guy coming up with megamillion ideas, and I swear I’m like him. I come up with all these ideas.” One of his proposals is a thirty-minute TV show starring himself, trying to solve problems in the kitchen like a one-man culinary A-Team. “Hopefully somebody will be interested in buying it,” he said. The show’s conceit summed up what Gonzales hoped would be his legacy: “There’s that idiot. He doesn’t know anything. But he figured it out.”
The day before I met Gonzales at his test kitchen, I’d called to ask if, in addition to specialties like fried butter, he could prepare some experimental items. I wanted to get a sense of the R&D process. Friends had suggested that I have Gonzales fry, among other things, a feather, an origami bird, and a small boot, but he had his own array of challenges in mind. On the large brushedsteel table, he had laid out his ingredients: Aunt Jemima buttermilk pancake mix, a can of Dole fruit
cocktail, a bag of powdered sugar, a box of Bisquick, a bag of microwave popcorn, a jar of confection sprinkles, a can of pineapple rings, a whisk, tongs, a skimmer spoon, and a few red mixing bowls. The deep fryer, measuring about two feet by three feet, sat adjacent to a steel industrial stove, heating a vat of oil.
Gonzales is a natural performer. He narrates the frying process with the verve of a cooking-show veteran, complete with humming punctuated by exclamations. One of the first things he fried for me was a fruit cocktail. “Let’s get as much of this excess liquid out as we can,” he said, pushing the lid down. Then he flipped the lid and spooned the contents into a mixing bowl of prepared pancake mix. “Put that in therrrre.” He walked to the fryer and began scooping it in, but almost immediately things went awry. “No—nooo, don’t turn into a blob,” he shouted. “We might have a failure.” He moved the pieces around with a mesh skimmer spoon. “It’s not adhering to the batter,” he said, pulling the unidentifiable brown bits out of the vat and tossing them onto a plate. “I don’t know what happened. We’ll put some powdered sugar on that.” He popped a piece in his mouth and motioned that it was so-so. “Man, I don’t know what kind of fruit I just had.” Cringing, he gave his verdict: “No fried fruit cocktails. Not a success.”
We made our way through the remaining ingredients on the table. We tried the pineapple ring (“Palate cleanser!” he said), the butter, and the popcorn, whose battered kernels withered into flavorless beige blobs. Eventually, he got around to his personal Mount Everest, something so impossible to fry that he hadn’t even laid it out on the table to begin with: lettuce. His kitchen monologue revealed his conflicted emotions about this undertaking. “I love it!” he said as he pulled a plastic box of precut romaine out of the refrigerator. He popped it open and stared at his ingredients. “This is just going to be awful,” he said, shaking his head. “But we’re going all the way.”
The level of difficulty of fried lettuce is pretty high up there, right near a ten. It is novel, for sure. Whether or not it can be good is questionable. And all this is moot if it doesn’t survive the fryer. Anything plunged into 350-to 375-degree oil loses moisture quickly, and a romaine leaf is 95 percent moisture to begin with. The bubbles that you see on the surface of a pot of boiling oil are the water molecules escaping from whatever is being fried. This is how frying works—it sucks away moisture, creating a crispy shell around a (hopefully) juicy center. The starch in a potato gives a french fry sufficient toughness to withstand this experience, one that, needless to say, spells death to a lettuce leaf.
Gonzales’s batter, therefore, had to be perfect to keep the lettuce from going limp. He had selected a Bisquick batter. He tossed the leaves from the salad box into his red mixing bowl and continued his monologue. “This is good, you know? Maybe it’s not going to come out that bad. I try to be optimistic. But I just assume it’s going to be bad until I actually work with it.”
He let the leaves soak in the batter for a moment: “I think this lettuce is going to fall apart on us. I always think that whatever you’re frying is like a little baby, and you have to protect the baby from the heat of that fryer. Some things, some little babies, are just not built—can’t take it. This is what I think when I think of the salad.” (Later on, when I asked Rosana Moreira, a professor in food engineering at Texas A&M, what batter she would suggest for a romaine leaf, she simply responded, “I do not think that is a good idea, do you?”)
As Gonzales tossed a few globs of leaves into the fryer, the oil hissed and an amoeba-shape of bubbles darted for the sides of the vat. He grabbed his spoon and quickly tried to separate the pieces. “I thought for sure it’d go down,” he said. He hesitated. “There is no way this is going to hold up.”
But the lettuce was not wilting. Using the skimmer spoon, Gonzales pulled the fried leaves out of the vat and placed them in a basket on the side of the fryer. A few seconds later, he tossed about eight leaves onto a dinner plate. They looked like flattened, gnarled frogs’ legs. “I’m going to try this little piece,” he said, reaching in. He chewed for about ten seconds, revealing no expression, then looked up. “Not so bad. I mean, it’s not disgusting. I didn’t spit it out.”
I took a piece. The interior was not mushy; the stalk and veins had held on to their tough, raw consistency. But unlike eating a lettuce leaf from the garden, this was like lettuce on steroids. Oddly, it had a strong, earthy flavor with an unexpected crunch. Gonzales nodded. “It’s not like, ‘Ooh, it’s great,’ but, yeah, it’s not bad! Let’s see what happens when you finish it off.”
Other cooks might have left well enough alone. They might have moved on to a more viable project. They would have heard the ghosts of generations of fryers saying, “Abel! Stop!” But Gonzales was compulsively interested now, and his muddling had evolved from a defeatist foray into weird food science to a culinary challenge of the highest order. He assembled the finishing touches while discussing the possibilities of an even more robust lettuce or a more ambitious batter, possibly a pesto sauce or an egg wash with bread crumbs or a batter with Italian seasonings that would encase each leaf in its own personal crouton. “It’s just so out-there,” he said. He drizzled Caesar dressing on the dish and sprinkled it with shredded Parmesan cheese. We stared for a moment at what was surely the world’s first deep-fried salad. Then he handed me a fork. At first I couldn’t place the flavor, but as Gonzales started nodding and discussing its actual potential as a major draw, it dawned on me: This was the taste of blasphemy. And it was good.
FRIED-CHEESE EPIPHANY AT A STREET FAIR
By Francis Lam
From Salon.com
A former Gourmet contributor, now the features editor of GiltTaste.com, Francis Lam underlays his spiky, entertaining prose with classical culinary training and an anthropologist’s eye for cultural markers. Local flavor, it turns out, can mean many things.
Street food, fast, cheap and out of control, is the current darling of the food lover’s world, but the culinary glories of the San Gennaro street fair in New York’s Little Italy are faded at best. Deep-fried Oreos offer 10 seconds of pleasure and an evening of regret; once-promising sausages get burned to charcoal before being stuffed into cold rolls with peppers steamed limp. It’s not for tasty things that I jostle my way through the perpetually mobbed festival, but to get a taste of a different sort of local flavor, mainly by overhearing things like this: “My pop got into a motorcycle accident and was in the hospital for weeks. My grandpa came over and started cookin’ all this Italian food. It was the best thing that ever happened to me!”
But, last weekend, while standing next to the man with the unfortunate father, I came upon three men frying mozzarella sticks in a wok who showed me some of the best qualities of American cuisine.
Standing behind a red banner that reads “Italian food” in Chinese characters, cooks from the very-buzzy restaurant Torrisi Italian Specialties were selling what looked like classic Italian American roast-pork-and-greens sandwiches—only the pork had the sugary red glaze of Cantonese barbecue and the buns the sweetish, smushy chew of bread from Hong Kong-style bakeries. I set out to write notes about how roasted peppers balanced all that sweet fatty goodness, about how, rather than the typical broccoli rabe, the greens were the sort served alongside bowls of wontons a few blocks away in Chinatown noodle shops, but before I could dig into my bag for a pen, the sandwich magically disappeared into my belly. Poof, gone! Ai ya! Mamma mia! The mozzarella sticks, crisp but with a chew that goes on for miles, didn’t last much longer.
The quality of this food wasn’t surprising. I happened to have dinner at Torrisi a few weeks ago and the cooking is off the charts. But, more intriguing, I noticed that this was an Italian restaurant that serves no actual food from Italy: no imported prosciutto, no imported pasta, no imported cheese—none of the signifiers of “authenticity” that most “serious” Italian restaurants pride themselves on. Rather, the pasta came from a nearby pasta maker, opened 100 years ago to serve Italian immigrants.
The curds for that superb house-made mozzarella come from Polly-O, the string-cheese people, whose roots are in a small Brooklyn storefront. And, most excitingly, the dried scallop garnish for its sautéed broccoli rabe came from Chinatown, one neighborhood over and half a world’s cuisine away.
It was a pairing that tasted utterly natural, the scallop’s dense ocean flavor weaving around the sweet bitterness of the greens. It was a combination that spoke of a conversation between cultures that rub up against one another in a country and a city of immigrants. For all our fashionable talk of locavorism, here, finally, was an interpretation of “eating locally” that’s not just about how far your food travels, but about community. It’s about getting to know your neighbors and their flavors and finding the ways that you can come together.
Cuisines taken by emigrants to new lands have always changed to adapt to the ingredients available to them, giving us such odd and delicious dishes as shrimp stir-fried with rum, a classic of Chinese Caribbeans made possible by the fact that the traditional rice wine was nowhere to be found in rum-producing Trinidad a hundred years ago. But with the ease of importing ingredients today, those naturally evolved cuisines may be a thing of the past; I mean, if you’re cooking to remind you of home when you feel very far away, you’re going to reach for a bottle of real rice wine if you can get your hands on it.
That seems to leave us, then, with cuisines that will either be slavish devotees to an “authentic” past, or the chef-driven, inflated-ego fusion food of the ’90s. Excited by the world but ungrounded in tradition, it was cool back then to just throw Mexican molé with Japanese wasabi, smother a chicken breast in it and serve it on a Caesar salad. Easy to come across exotic flavor but hard to come across coherence; it was the stuff of fad, not evolution.