I don't know what it says about me that three separate people stopped me on the same day to ask if I'd heard a particular story on National Public Radio about deep-fried Twinkies. Sadly, I hadn't, but as I understand it, this is the gist:
State fairs, long renowned for spectacularly unhealthy junk food, have apparently been outdoing themselves this year. In California, the fair food of the moment is batter-dipped, deep-fried Twinkies.
Think about that for a moment. Can you feel your arteries stiffen up?
Twinkies, however, are just the beginning. Fair-goers in Illinois are eating deep-fried Snickers Bars on sticks. They look like corndogs but they are (and this can not be stressed enough) deep-fried candy bars.
Actually, this sort of food did not suddenly spring into being this summer, nor does it appear only on the midway. Deep-fried Mars Bars have been a staple of late-night pub-crawlers in Scotland for years, and batter-fried Oreos have been around in the Midwest for a long time as well.
Mindful of its long-standing tradition of community service, the staff of HippoPress decided to test this sort of food last weekend. In an effort to cover as much junk food territory as possible, the following were deep-fried: Oreos, Snickers bars, Twinkies, peanut butter cups, Funnybones (a peanut butter-filled chocolate snack cake), Peppermint Patties, and one unfortunate chocolate chip cookie that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All items were dipped in funnel-cake batter (1-2/3 cups all-purpose flour; 1/4 teaspoon salt; 3/4 teaspoon baking soda; 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar; 2 tablespoons granulated sugar; 1 egg; 1-2/3 cup milk) and fried in vegetable oil at 350 degrees. Here is what we discovered.
Deep-fried Snickers bars are a tragic, tragic mistake. None of the deep-fried candy worked very well, but the Snickers failed spectacularly. The soft, only slightly golden-brown funnel cake batter could not stand up to the stronger flavor of the chocolate and was completely overpowered. "Deep-fried s**t on a stick," was one taster's appraisal of it, and that sentiment was generally accepted as accurate, though nobody else was quite so blunt. Most other tasters put it in the "culinary train wreck" category. The chocolate just didn't taste right and something sinister happened to the texture of the peanuts inside. There was some speculation that another type of batter-something crispier, along the lines of a tempura batter- might have stood up to the Snickers bar and made a better snack, but nobody had the courage to actually test this theory. One dance with Miss Snickers was more than enough.
Surreally, the deep-fried Twinkies had a light, refreshing quality. Granted, after the Snickers debacle, that was more or less inevitable, but still, the Twinkies were surprisingly good. The funnel cake batter had a very slight crispiness to it, which contrasted well with the fluffy yellow cake of the Twinkie, which in turn contrasted with the creamy filling inside. There was a sort of progression of textures-from crispy to fluffy to soft-that was very pleasant. The combination of tastes worked well, too. This was the only item in this experiment that could, by the most athletic stretch of the imagination, be considered subtle. It worked.
(A dissenting view: A small minority of the tasters felt the Twinkie tasted like "fried dough with cream in it," which is not a good thing.)
The less said about the Peppermint Patties and peanut butter cups, the better. They were not as mind-numbingly horrible as the Snickers bar, but still fell into the category of "really not very good at all."
The poor chocolate chip cookie fared better. It wasn't bad, but just tasted like a really fat chocolate chip cookie. Part of the problem is that chocolate chip cookies are supposed to be hot and crispy and chewy all the same time, so batter-frying it didn't change its essential character.
The runaway, grand champion, Big Kahuna winner of the day was by far the fried Oreos. Nobody was prepared for just how good these were. Most telling perhaps was a taster who was not only prepared to hate this, but actively committed to hating it. After one bite, her eyes teared up and she bent almost double with simultaneous pleasure and shame. "This is WON-derful!" she blurted out, hating herself for saying it.
It's hard to explain just why the deep-fried Oreos were so good, but here is our best effort:
"Because of the way the batter flowed over the shape of the cookies, they formed dumpling-like puffs," wrote one taster. "Biting into one, I was impressed with how the Oreo gave itself up completely to the funnel cake batter." (This florid sort of description was typical of the general reaction, by the way. The Oreos sounded less like a snack-food than the heroine of a romance novel.) "The sweet filling had melted and dissolved a little, but was still present, while the cookie portion had softened enough to meld seamlessly."
Or, as another taster put it more succinctly, "What are you doing, messing around with crap like that Snickers when you could have given us this!?"
