No State Fair? No worries! How to deep-fry sweets at home

(This is the final installment of a series that brought State Fair food to you. Believe it or not, you can make some of your favorite Fair foods at home. We asked Fair vendors their secret to making their signature foods. While they wouldn’t divulge their recipes, they let us in on a few of their secrets. We then tried it ourselves.)

***

Syracuse, N.Y. — We saved the sweetest, most fattening and probably the most dangerous State Fair food for last.

Over the past month, we’ve grilled steak, chicken and gyro meat. We smoked turkey drumsticks. We’ve blended wine and fruit. We also came pretty close to copying the best waffles in the whole world.

Now it’s time to deep-fry some sweet stuff. We’re going to take a page right out of the Shamrock Tavern’s State Fair cookbook. (One of these days, owner Steve Sommers might actually publish such a manual, and it’s sure to be a best-seller.)

“What have we fried over the years? It’s more like ’What HAVEN’T we fried,’ over the years,” said Sommers, who’s run the Shamrock Tavern stand at the Fair since the early 1990s. “We’ve done candy bars, Spam, pie. You name it. But it all started with Oreos.”

Indeed it does, so that’s what we started with.

The first lesson when deep-frying at home is to not be intimidated. We State Fair civilians are used to letting others deal with the hot oil in those industrial-strength appliances. Most of us don’t have those at home.

Worry not. All you really need is a stove top, a deep pan and a thermometer.

Oh, and a fire extinguisher.

Earlier in the month, I tried making pizze fritte in my kitchen. It ended up being an oily mess, and while the fried dough tasted pretty good, it was nothing like the real thing made at the Villa stand. A reader — Mike from Westvale — felt sorry for me and suggested I try this round of deep-frying in his back yard, using the side burner on his propane grill. I gladly took Mike from Westvale up on his offer because I just couldn’t stomach waking up to the smell of dirty oil for another week.

I showed up with a gallon of canola oil, a basket full of junk food and some kitchen utensils. Sommers suggests heating the oil to 375 degrees. We tried, but it was taking too long so we topped out at 350.

For the batter, we used New Hope Mills pancake mix, a premium product made in Auburn. Sommers’ batter contains flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and malt vinegar.

A few deep-frying experts shared two rules for the whole process: keep the batter thick so it sticks to the main ingredient, and refrigerate whatever it is you’re cooking up.

“If you skip that step, you’ll be sorry,” Sommers said. “You don’t want it to melt or fall apart, so it needs to be cold.”

Mike from Westvale thoroughly coated each chilled cookie with the thick batter and gently lowered each one into the oil, one by one, waving the cookie back and forth so the dripping dough didn’t break apart and create curly fries that tasted like pancakes.

These cooked quickly. We flipped them after a minute, when it was clearly turning golden. The second side browned in 30 seconds. We skimmed them out, put them on a drying rack and sprinkled them with powdered sugar.

The first batch lost a lot of the coating because, as we were warned by all the experts out there, the batter was too watery. The subsequent batch, I’m happy to report, was true State Fair quality.

“I doubt that,” Sommers said.

No, it really was. They just didn’t look as good as the Shamrock’s Oreo cookies.

From there, we moved to deep-fried Twinkies. Mike from Westvale followed the same process, coating the cold Hostess cream-filled sponge treat with extra-thick pancake batter and swirling it into the oil bath. After 90 seconds, we had a Twinkie that was truly better than any Twinkie to come out of a box. Hostess should deep fry all of their Twinkies.

We then tried Pop Tarts (one iced strawberry and one iced brown sugar). Then it was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. To save time, we fried frozen pre-made Uncrustables PB&Js. They all held their form, and they all pretty much tasted like deep-fried sugar.

We saved the worst for the last. Who knew that candy bars could be so difficult to deep-fry? Mike from Westvale certainly didn’t, but we tried anyway.

We thought we had given them a thick-enough coating of batter before dropping them into the oil. The problem, though, was that after an hour of cooking stuff, the oil dropped in temperature. We should’ve waited for it to heat back to 350 (or 375 if we wanted to truly do it right).

While the oil wasn’t quit hot enough, it was hot enough to melt the chocolate off of the end of the Twix bars. Or maybe that was the Kit Kat. We couldn’t tell. They looked and tasted the same after coming out of the oil and getting doused with powdered sugar.

The good news in all of this was that we didn’t have to use Mike from Westvale’s fire extinguisher, and we learned how to deep-fry stuff.

There’s even some better news: Sommers will be back at the State Fair with some new items on the Shamrock menu.

“We’ve been working on some fun stuff already,” he said. “We had hoped to show it off this year, but it can wait. It’ll be worth it.”

Yes, it will be.

MORE ON STATE FAIR

Your guide to a DIY 2020 New York State Fair (video)

No State Fair? No worries! How to make Bosco’s Potatoes O’Rielly and prime rib sandwich at home

No State Fair? No worries! How to make Pizze Fritte at home

No State Fair? No worries! How to make Maurice’s Belgian waffle sundaes at home

No State Fair? No worries! How to make wine slushies at home

No State Fair? No worries! How to make gyros at home

No State Fair? No worries! How to make smoked turkey legs at home

No State Fair? No worries! How to make a hot beef sundae at home

Charlie Miller finds the best in food, drink and fun across Central New York. Contact him at 315-382-1984, or by email at cmiller@syracuse.com.