I Believe I Can Fry
How a mild-mannered database analyst became the undisputed king of the fair park fryers—and the master of a heart stopping new culinary movement.
Gonzales, photographed on July 26, 2010, in Dallas.
Photograph by Darren Braun
Abel Gonzales Jr., age forty, is the high priest of frying at the State Fair of Texas, which is to say, the world. Since 2005, when the fair introduced the Big Tex Choice Awards, a kind of Oscars for excellence in frying, four of the little statuettes have gone to him. He has fried Coca-Cola and cookie dough and pineapple rings, among other offerings that profit dentists. Followers taste his commitment and reciprocate with enthusiasm. It is not unheard of to see groups of girls screaming as he walks through the fairgrounds. A few years back, a couple found his talents so moving that they asked him to officiate their wedding. Once, a devoted fan requested that the master deep-fry his vinyl wallet. After Gonzales reluctantly complied, the young man looked at his girl and, in what must have been a serious turning point in their relationship, held the crispy billfold in the air and whooped.
Since the advent of the Big Tex Choice Awards, extreme frying has become a seasonal rite. Every fall, the crowds venture out of the comfort of the air-conditioning, drawn by the hiss of the Fair Park fryers. Media outlets rack their brains for puns, such as “Come Fry With Me” (the Economist) and “It’s Oil or Nothing” (Dallas Morning News). The past few years, a good deal of their attention has also focused on Gonzales. From television (Oprah, Today) to the farthest corners of the blogosphere, Gonzales’s work has been featured and dissected. Andrew Zimmern, the host of the popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods, declared him “the Willy Wonka of the Texas State Fair.” Oprah simply referred to him as a “guru.”
I met Gonzales in March at his temporary test kitchen in the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, in Dallas. He would not share with me his concept for this year (the judging is on Labor Day), but he had agreed to cook for me what many people consider to be his masterpiece: fried butter, which won last year’s Big Tex award for most creative food. For a man about to place frozen balls of dough-wrapped butter into a vat of oil, Gonzales was surprisingly trim, with only full, dimpled cheeks attesting to his occasionally unhealthy diet. A Vandyke beard and jumpy, expressive eyebrows gave him a mischievous appearance. That day, he wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a classic white chef’s jacket that he was quick to downplay. “I’m not a chef. This whole coat thing really makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “I wear them a lot because I’m in the kitchen and blah, blah, blah. But I’m not a chef. You know, I never claimed to be a chef.”
Since he works only during the three-week duration of the fair (this year it runs from September 24 to October 17) and takes off the rest of the year to travel and hang out at home with his dog, the best way to describe Gonzales’s professional life is to say that he’s a “concessionaire,” though the term undersells him the way “band” does the Beatles. His imagination never rests. Three years ago, for example, a beer distribution company asked him to concoct a deep-fried beer. He was able to turn the product around quickly and easily, and even if he didn’t see a market for the result, the commission did get him thinking about beer. Over a six-month period, he experimented and came up with a potato chip that tasted like beer. “I soaked kettle chips in this beer solution, and then I fried them,” he said. “When they come out of the fryer, they’re really crisp, and I use the salt-and-beer-flavoring mixture to spread on top.” And he didn’t stop there. “I was really going crazy at the time, pushing the envelope,” he told me. “I made a one-ounce liquid that, when poured into a beer, would completely change the taste of the beer. So you could start out with Coors Light, pour this one-ounce shot into it, and it would turn into a piña colada, a margarita, a cosmopolitan, whatever. It would remain fizzy, but the whole taste complex would completely change. You take a creamy beer like Guinness or Negra Modelo, and the root beer shot made it out of this world.” One can argue the merits of these concoctions, but the fact is that all of Gonzales’s creations sound pretty gross at first. They must be tasted to be judged.
Gonzales lifted the fry basket out of the oil, tossed the five balls of dough on a plate, drizzled them with honey, and dusted them with powdered sugar, coaching me all the while in the ways to avoid a squirting mess. He waited a few seconds as they cooled, then dived in, motioning for me to hurry. I popped one, bracing myself for a coating of grease followed by a mushy, slightly salty lard ball. Instead, it was the most majestic breadstuff I’d ever eaten, sweet, then doughy, then warm, with a twist at the end: a tiny pat of butter, just barely starting to melt, like an opiate at the center of the world’s most scandalous doughnut.
The process of cooking food in hot fat is only slightly less ancient than roasting a carcass on an outdoor fire. The Egyptians used goose, pork, and beef fat for frying. Arabian cooks preferred the unique flavor of sheep’s tail fat. Worldwide, the victuals endorsed for submersion varied, but the general tenet down through the ages seemed to be that just about anything was better cooked in oil. (Jerry Hopkins, the author of Extreme Cuisine: The Weird and Wonderful Foods That People Eat, suggests that rats rubbed with garlic, salt, and pepper and then dunked in hot vegetable oil for six to seven minutes are, if not delicious, at least edible.)
But deep-frying didn’t find its ideal showcase until the fair phenomenon caught on in America in the late-nineteenth century. Fair cookery was a way for inventive American cooks to demonstrate creativity and resourcefulness. An exhibit of an immense pumpkin or an eleven-ton wheel of cheese was impressive to look at but ultimately invited a very practical question: How do you eat it? According to Warren Belasco in Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, cooking contests arose as a solution. They were also a way of celebrating the great abundance of American farms, a kind of culinary brag. Popular demonstrations riffed on American staples such as corn, a grain that the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair featured in three hundred preparations, including cream of cornstarch pudding, hominy Florentine, pilau, Brunswick stew, mush croquettes, cream pie, Boston bread, Victorian corn gems, and corn dodgers.
Unfortunately for those present, the selection did not include a hot dog dipped in cornmeal batter and deep-fried. That future treasure of the fair circuit would belong to Carl and Neil Fletcher, brothers who came to Dallas in 1930 and decided to augment their income as vaudevillians by inventing the “corny dog,” made famous at the 1942 state fair. “We have heard some fellow had used a mold to put cornbread around a wiener, but that was too slow,” Neil told the New York Times in an interview in 1983. “So my brother started thinking and said, ‘Why not mix a batter that would stay on a weenie?’ So we started experimenting in the kitchen and finally came up with a batter that would stay on. It tasted like hell. When we got one that tasted okay it wouldn’t stay on the weenie. We must have tried about sixty times until we got one that was right, and we spent another twelve years improving it. We haven’t touched it since.”
The corny dog is unquestionably the finest concession ever created in the state of Texas. Though both Fletcher brothers have since died, the fortunate Fletcher descendants who now run the business sell about half a million of their inventions during the run of the fair. Corny dogs routinely outsell all other fair foods, such as funnel cakes, nachos, turkey legs, sausage on a stick, roasted corn, cotton candy, and anything else dispensed from the roughly two hundred food booths and carts at the state fair. Around eighty vendors control these concessions, which are leased on a year-to-year basis and often held onto fiercely by a family (like the Fletchers) for generations. Lots of luck to the outsider who wants in. Hundreds of applicants fight for the two or three locations that become available each year.
For decades the Fletcher brothers’ awe-inspiring invention did not attract any challengers from the other sellers. That all changed in 2005.“You always want to have some things new and different at the fair,” explained Ron Black, the fair’s senior vice president of food and beverage. “New cars, new shows, new booths.” Apparently while visitors still looked forward to their annual gastronomic overload, even the most charitable confessed that their encounters had grown stale. So Black and his people devised a contest designed to prod the concessionaires’ imaginations: the Big Tex Choice Awards. The process would begin with a letter sent to all State Fair of Texas concessionaires, inviting them to mail in a description of a new and audacious dish. Next, a committee of anonymous judges would wade through the submissions and choose the finalists. Finally, on Labor Day, the fair would host a big tasting, with three or four judges rating the dishes on a scale of one to ten in two categories: Best Taste and Most Creative. Winners would be awarded a golden statuette, the body resembling an Academy Award, the head a bobbling likeness of Big Tex.
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