We are trying to eat healthier, more sustainably and with more social awareness. This article really isn’t about that. It’s about Cooking State Fair Food (and all its deep-fried decadence) at home.
It doesn’t matter how you dress up deep fried foods, they are a treat. The State Fair is a treat. That said, I did start with a healthified corn dog recipe from Out of the Box. Then we dialed back the healthy to fit our budget and time constraints. If you care at all about making a healthier recipe, I would start with their recipe.
Shopping and Setting Up
We only had time to go to one grocery store, and we chose Aldi. Aldi’s corn flour is wholegrain and all natural; but that’s pretty much where we stopped with the healthy ingredients. I believe Aldi does have some turkey franks, but we chose to go with the all beef hot dogs. All these things can be modified to fit your family’s personal tastes and your own shopping preferences. Overall we found this recipe to be much easier than we expected and way better than any corn dog we ever ate.
As long as we had the oil heated up, we also made deep fried cheese sticks — using the same batter we made for the corn dogs and deep fried Oreos (actually the Aldi knock-off) — using just-add-water boxed pancake mix. This entire meal was delicious, not particularly nutritious and will probably suffice for deep fried foods until well into the football season.
This is our modified recipes with pictures.
Homemade Deep Fried Corn Dogs
Ingredients:
- Â One Package of Hot Dogs stuck through with chopsticks.
- 1 1/4 C corn meal
- 3/4 C flour
- Â 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- Â 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp honey
- 2 eggs
- Â 3/4 C milk
- Enough Oil to fill big wok halfway
The recipe we followed had suggested mixing the batter by shaking it in a jar and then dipping the hotdogs into it. This did not work at all. We ended up dumping it into a shallow bowland “painting” the batter on with a spatula. I’d suggest skipping the jar and just mix it in a mixing bowl. Our 8-year-old did the mixing with supervision and dipped and painted her own dog.
It is really important to make sure the chopstick goes at least three-quarters of the way through the hot dog. Otherwise it will be too floppy and maybe fall off.
While we were prepping the dogs, we heated oil in our wok. This is the point at which we realized our new kitchen thermometers don’t have temperature marks on them (only “rare”, “medium” and “well done”). So we just waited the oil sizzled when we flicked water on it. If you have kitchen thermometers that are actually useful, heat the oil to 375ish. When the oil is ready, set the corn dogs in the oil. Cook until they are golden brown.
Because of the nice, long chopsticks, we let the 8-year-old put her own hot dog in the oil with a warning that she needed to do it slowly and then back away so she didn’t get splattered.
This is what the corn dogs looked like when they were done. We all thought these were the best corn dogs we ever had. We think we’ll make them again sometime during football season.
Homemade Deep Fried Cheese Sticks
After we made all the corn dogs, we used the remainder of the batter to coat cheese sticks. These were also deep fried in the wok — using a plastic slotted spoon to set them in and pull them out. Again we fried these until they were golden brown. We did not let our kids help with any portion of the cheese. It was too messy and dangerous.
(This meal is embarrassingly unhealthy. I really wish I could tell you we had a salad or some sort of veggie with this, but I don’t want to lie.)
Homemade Deep Fried Oreos
After we deep fried our dinner of hotdogs and cheese we made deep-fried Oreos. There is no real recipe to this. We mixed up one cup of just-add-water pancake mix with the appropriate amount of water, dipped the Oreos and fried them. Once again, the eight-year-old did the mixing with supervision, but we did not let her help with putting them in or out of the oil. These were to die for; but we were pretty deep-fried out by the end of this process, so the majority of the cookies went out to the DJs working in our studio.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I never want to eat this much deep-fried food in one sitting again. If you are concerned about overspending at the Fair, this could be a good tactic. Make these foods a day before you go; and you’ll be seeking out the healthy food at the fair for sure. Then concentrate on these 50 Things To Do For Families at the Minnesota State Fair.
how much did it cost to go there? and did you have to drive there or walk