DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, HOST:
August is state fair season, and that means fair foods - the fabulous and audacious and shocking-for-the-sake-of-shocking concoctions that have us lining up in front of fry baskets, iPhone cameras ready. What's new at the Iowa State Fair this year? For starters, there's a peanut-butter-and-jelly corndog. Love at first bite, said food writer Elijah Decious in his review for The Gazette, a newspaper in Cedar Rapids. The breading around the hot dog is sweet. The peanut butter is savory. And the combo is as American as - well, as a PB&J corndog.
The Iowa State Fair is the 11-day spectacular that gave us deep-fried butter on a stick a few years ago, so maybe this next one shouldn't be surprising. This year, there is a soft-serve ice cream cone dipped in butter. Melted butter hardens into a sort of coating around the cold ice cream. So especially out in the Iowa sun, you'll also need a handful of napkins. Elijah Decious was a fan of the cone until, he said, the butter congealed in his mouth and formed a kind of waxy ball. The butter-dipped ice cream cone is just unhinged enough to make people drop to their knees in gratitude that the state fair comes around and that it only comes around once a year. Never change, Iowa. Never change.
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